Image credit and copyright: David Hathaway/NASA/MSFC

The apparition might be connected to hurricane Sandy. The core of the storm swept well north of Alabama, but Sandy's outer bands did pass over the area, apparently leaving behind a thin haze of ice crystals in cirrus clouds. Sunlight shining through the crystals produced an unusually rich variety of ice halos.

"By my count, there are two sun dogs, a 22o halo, a parahelic circle, an upper tangent arc, and a parry arc," says Chris Brightwell, who also photographed the display. "It was amazing."

If the display really was a result of Sandy, sky watchers might not have to wait a decade for the next show. Some researchers believe that superstorms will become more common in the years ahead as a result of climate change, creating new things both terrible and beautiful to see overhead. Sky watchers in the storm zone should remain alert for the unusual.

GROUND-HUGGING RAINBOW: Most rainbows arch up into the sky, but on Oct. 27th, Stefan Elieff of Punta Arenas, Chile, photographed one that seemed to hug the ground:

"Scattered rain clouds were rolling in low over the hills behind the city when this unusually low rainbow appeared," says Elieff.

Although low rainbows are seldom seen, they are actually quite common. They appear whenever raindrops are illuminated by a high-hanging sun. "A rainbow's center and the sun are always on opposite sides of the sky," explains atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley. "So when the sun is high, the rainbow is low. Indeed, as the sun climbs, the rainbow sinks--sometimes right into the sea."
www.spaceweather.com

Trailer for documentary, hosted by Antara Brandner, presenting ten futurist thinkers who are dedicated to the flourishing of Mother Earth.

Wisdom of the Wayshowers Trailer

Uploaded by KentHealy on 12 Apr 2009

A scientific approach to explaining the power of thought. We have all heard it before, "Your thoughts create your reality." Well, new quantum physics studies support this idea. Learn about recent research about how the mind can influence the behavior of subatomic particles and physical matter. If you enjoy the video, please pass it on to friends and family.

HUNTER'S MOON: There's a full Moon coming on Monday, Oct. 29th, and according to folklore it has a special name: the Hunter's Moon. Some native American tribes gave it that name to mark the autumn hunts that topped off their food supplies for the coming winter. Think of that when the bright orb rises tomorrow, and enjoy the Hunter's moonlight.

SLOW ERUPTION: The magnetic canopy of a sunspot group just over the sun's southwestern limb slowly erupted on Oct. 28th. When the hours-long eruption was over, this bright arcade formed over the blast site, marking the location where the explosion occurred:

Arcade loops appear after many solar flares. It is how the magnetic fields of sunspots settle down after a significant eruption. This particular eruption hurled a massive CME into space, but Earth was not in the line of fire. As the movie shows, the explosion was photogenic, but not geoeffective.
www.spaceweather.com

 Several films and documentaries have promoted the idea that the ancient Mayan calendar predicts that doomsday is less than two months away, on December 21, 2012. The Culture Ministry is hosting a massive event in Guatemala City—which as many as 90,000 people are expected to attend—just in case the world actually does end, while tour groups are promoting doomsday-themed getaways.

Maya leader Gomez urged the Tourism Institute to rethink the doomsday celebration, which he criticized as a "show" that was disrespectful to Mayan culture. Experts say that for the Maya, all that ends in 2012 is one of their calendar cycles, not the world. Gomez's group issued a statement saying that the new Maya time cycle simply "means there will be big changes on the personal, family and community level, so that there is harmony and balance between mankind and nature."

Oxlajuj Ajpop is holding events it considers sacred in five cities to mark the event and Gomez said the Culture Ministry would be wise to throw its support behind their real celebrations. More than half of Guatemala's population of nearly 15 million are from indigenous groups of Mayan descent.

The Mayan calendar has 18 months of 20 days each plus a sacred month, "Wayeb," of five days. "B'aktun" is the larget unit in the time cycle system, and is about 400 years. The broader era spans 13 B'aktun, or about 5,200 years. The Mayan culture enjoyed a golden age between 250 AD and 900 AD.

Sources: Zen-haven and Phys.org

New Research Suggests Humans Can Sense Future Events Without Any Known Clues

What's more, sceptical psychologists who have pored over a preprint of the paper say they can't find any significant flaws. "My personal view is that this is ridiculous and can't be true," says Joachim Krueger of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who has blogged about the work on the Psychology Today website. "Going after the methodology and the experimental design is the first line of attack. But frankly, I didn't see anything. Everything seemed to be in good order."

Read more at:  http://preventdisease.com/news/12/102412_New-Research-Suggests-Humans-Can-Sense-Future-Events-Without-Any-Known-Clues.shtml

Earth orbiting satellites have just detected an X1-class solar flare (Oct. 23 @ 0322 UT) from big sunspot AR1598. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the extreme ultraviolet flash:

Radiation from the flare created waves of ionization in the upper atmosphere over Asia and Australia (the daylit side of Earth) and possibly HF radio blackouts at high latitudes. It is too soon to say whether the blast also hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space. Stay tuned for updates.                        www.spaceweather.com

Today at 1814 UT, Earth-orbiting satellites detected an impulsive M9-class solar flare. The source was an active region just behind the sun's southeastern limb. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the extreme ultraviolet flash.  Radio blackouts and ionization waves in the upper atmosphere are possible on the dayside of Earth as a result of this event. Stay tuned for updates.

Uploaded by AnimusicLLC on 18 Mar 2008

From the Animusic 2 DVD - This is another amazing piece of incredibly beautiful and precise work from Animusic - more information at www.animusic.com.

Published on 16 Oct 2012 by Suspicious0bservers

ORIONID METEOR SHOWER: Next weekend, Earth will pass through a stream of debris from Halley's Comet, source of the annual Orionid meteor shower. Forecasters expect 25 meteors per hour when the shower peaks on Oct. 21st.

Uploaded by TheSpiritScience on 1 Jan 2012
This week, lets get Meditational!

Twitter - @spiritsciences
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/thespiritscience

Learning Meditation
http://www.learningmeditation.com/

The point of Meditation
http://www.mindtweaks.com/wordpress/?p=410

Hemi-Sync
http://www.hemi-sync.com/

iDoser
http://www.i-doser.com/

A G1-class geomagnetic storm is underway on Oct. 13th. Reports of bright auroras have been received from Scandinavia, Greenland, Canada and several northern-tier US states. Colin Chatfield sends this picture from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan:

"This is from my backyard around 5:00a.m. this morning," says Chatfield. "Never have I seen the auroras so bright, especially from within the city. They were astounding, with purple visible to the naked eye."

The ongoing storm was triggered by a knot of south-pointing magnetism from the sun. During the early hours of Oct. 13th, the knot bumped into Earth's magnetic field, opening a crack in our planet's magnetosphere. Solar wind poured in to fuel the auroras.

More auroras are in the offing. NOAA forecasters estimate a 40% chance of strong polar geomagnetic storms on Oct. 14th when a solar wind stream is expected to blow past Earth. High-latitude sky watchers shuld be alert for auroras.
www.spaceweather.com

Physicists say there may be a way to prove that we live in a computer simulation
- by George Dvorsky
Back in 2003, Oxford professor Nick Bostrom suggested that we may be living in a computer simulation. In his paper, Bostrom offered very little science to support his hypothesis — though he did calculate the computational requirements needed to pull off such a feat. And indeed, a philosophical claim is one thing, actually proving it is quite another. But now, a team of physicists say proof might be possible, and that it's a matter of finding a cosmological signature that would serve as the proverbial Red Pill from the Matrix.

And they think they know what it is. According to Silas Beane and his team at the University of Bonn in Germany, a simulation of the universe should still have constraints, no matter how powerful. These limitations, they argue, would be observed by the people within the simulation as a kind of constraint on physical processes.

So, how could we ever hope to identify these constraints? Easy: We just need build our own simulation of the universe and find out. And in fact, this is fairly close to what the physicists are actually trying to do. To that end, they've created an ultra-small version of the universe that's down to the femto-scale (which is even smaller than the nano-scale). And to help isolate the sought-after signature, the physicists are simulating quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which is the fundamental force in nature that gives rise to the strong nuclear force among protons and neutrons, and to nuclei and their interactions.

To replace the space-time continuum, they are computing tiny, tightly spaced cubic "lattices." They call this "lattice gauge theory" and it is subsequently providing new insights into the nature of matter itself.

Interestingly, the researchers consider their simulation to be a forerunner to more powerful versions in which molecules, cells, and even humans themselves might someday be generated. But for now, they're interested in creating accurate models of cosmological processes — and finding out which ones might represent hard limits for simulations.

....read more at : http://io9.com/5950543/physicists-say-there-may-be-a-way-to-prove-that-we-live-in-a-computer-simulation

RADIO STORM ON JUPITER: Last night there was a storm on Jupiter--a radio storm. Amateur radio astronomer Thomas Ashcraft recorded the event using a shortwave radio telescope located in New Mexico. Click on the following link* (a plot of intensity vs. frequency vs. time) to hear the whooshing, crackling, popping sounds that emerged from his telescope's loudspeaker:   *http://spaceweather.com/images2012/12oct12/crash.mp3

"Listen to the recording in stereo," advises Ashcraft. "I recorded the audio from two separate radios at 21.1 MHz and 20.9 MHz, so there is a stereo spatial effect from the frequency drift of the emissions."

Jupiter's radio storms are caused by natural radio lasers in the planet's magnetosphere that sweep past Earth as Jupiter rotates. Electrical currents flowing between Jupiter's upper atmosphere and the volcanic moon Io can boost these emissions to power levels easily detected by ham radio antennas on Earth. Jovian "S-bursts" and "L-bursts" mimic the sounds of woodpeckers, whales, and waves crashing on the beach. Here are a few audio samples: S-bursts, S-bursts (slowed down 128:1), L-Bursts

Now is a good time to listen to Jupiter's radio storms. The distance between Earth and Jupiter is decreasing as the giant planet approaches opposition on Dec. 3rd; the closer Jupiter gets, the louder it gets.