09/26/11 – Ephemeris – The sun is getting very active again
Monday, September 26th. The sun will rise at 7:34. It’ll be up for 11 hours and 58 minutes, setting at 7:32. The moon, 1 day before new, will rise at 7:53 tomorrow morning.
There is a large sunspot group rotating onto the earth facing side of the sun. It has already produced two large solar flares. Flares are explosions caused by the snapping of the magnetic field lines that cause the sunspots in the first place. The most energetic of these throw off a huge cloud of charged particles, protons, electrons, and alpha particles called a coronal mass ejection or CME at a couple of million miles an hour. It takes 36 to 48 hours for the cloud to reach the earth. Then it tangles with the earth’s magnetic field causing a geomagnetic storm. This is not good news for satellite operators and power and phone companies in the north. However for the rest of us, we get a chance to see the northern lights or Aurora Borealis. Saturday’s two flares from that sunspot group sent out a CME that we may catch the tail of later today.
* Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog 