You don't see this every day, especially not in Florida. On April 23rd, a pair of glowing V's appeared above the setting sun, both caused by ice crystals in the air. Dan Gore photographed them from Viera, FL:

"They lingered for about 5 minutes, then they were gone," says Gore. "It was a beautiful sight."
These are sun halos, one rare and one common. The lower 'V' is a common upper tangent arc created by sunlight shining through pencil-shaped ice crystals. The upper 'V' is a rare Parry arc created by similar kinds of ice crystals, but... To make the Parry arc, the crystals had to be horizontal, not rotate, and have two faces horizontal, too. It sounds improbable, and it is. That's why the Parry arc is so rare.
What's all this ice doing in Florida air? The crystals were located in cirrus clouds 5 to 10 km above the ground where the air is always freezing--even in Florida. Parry arcs prefer cold climates, but they can appear in the Sunshine State, too.
www.spaceweather.com

Today, planetary scientists, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of Caltech announced intriguing evidence for a Neptune-sized planet orbiting the sun beyond Pluto. Sedna and five other objects in the outer solar system are grouped together as if they are being shepherded by a larger body. That body, say Batygin and Brown, is a planet at least 10 times as massive as Earth traveling along an elliptical orbit more than 200 AU from the sun. This is the most persuasive argument so far for the existence of a "Planet X." Until someone actually sees the planet in a telescope, however, it's just a hypothesis. So let the hunt begin! The full story was published in the Jan. 20th edition of Science Magazine.      www.spaceweather.com

Suspicious0bservers

Published on 12 May 2014

CLIMATE CHANGE IS VERY REAL - BUT THE OFFICIALS HAVE JEOPARDIZED OUR ABILITY TO PREPARE FOR THE FUTURE
Global warming models/predictions have been an abject failure for 20 years, and yet the IPCC claims ever-higher certainty? 
How does this happen and what comes next?

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Many of us have witnessed sun pillars--columns of light that lance upwards from the horizon just as the sun is rising or setting. They are caused by plate-shaped ice crystals in clouds that bend the rays of the low-hanging sun. While sun pillars are frequently seen, in all seasons and at all latitudes, elusive companions of sun pillars may have been frequently overlooked. They are called sun pillar "echos":

Atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley explains: "13 years ago in Finland, three halo experts saw peculiar 'echoes' straddling an otherwise ordinary sun pillar. They could not be explained and there the matter rested for want of confirmation by another observation. Then, last week, Jon Inghram sent me several sun pillar images. He too had noticed faint 'echoes' on each side of his pillar – the mysterious ice halo was at last confirmed!"

"More details and pictures may be found in an article here. But we still cannot explain them. The Finland observers, Jon and I have each tried simulations using the flattened pyramid crystals invoked to account for elliptical halos. They do not work at all well. We need many more observations! Take plenty of pictures of each pillar. The echoes are easily overlooked or mistaken for cloud patches and have probably been seen many times. Observations under different conditions could help unravel their mystery."     http://spaceweather.com/

No, it's not an alien planet. It's just Rio. On Jan. 23rd, Helio C. Vital looked out over the ocean from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and saw something out of this world--a rectangular sun:

As alien as it appeared, this was a phenomenon of Earth. "An inversion air layer next to the sea surface caused the top of the setting sun to acquire unusual shapes. In a matter of tens of seconds, it went from a saucer to a cup, then to a rectangle," says Vital.

Atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley explains further: "A mirage morphed the sun into a rectangular block brighter at its top edge. It is even more complex than it seems. Sun rays are deflected (refracted) through the different temperature layers of a temperature inversion, cold air trapped beneath warmer air, to form not one sun image but three or even more. The topmost bright strip is the sun grazing the top of the inversion layer.   Beneath it are two or more sun images, half of them rising and the others descending. They overlap to form the rectangle. Other shots show the separate sun images."

"Look for these mock-mirages and their green flashes when the horizon shows a dark band of a temperature inversion," he advises. "But take care and never ever use binoculars or a telescope. Magnified sunlight can cause serious eye damage."
www.spaceweather.com

January 17, 2014 – UNIVERSE – Scientists are saying that the Sun is in a phase of “solar lull” – meaning that it has fallen asleep – and it is baffling them. History suggests that periods of unusual “solar lull” coincide with bitterly cold winters. Rebecca Morelle reports for BBC Newsnight on the effect this inactivity could have on our current climate, and what the implications might be for global warming. –BBC

'WHY HAS THE SUN GONE TO SLEEP?' - BBC NEWS :  BBC News ·503 videos  :  Published on 17 Jan 2014

http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2014/01/17/has-the-sun-gone-to-sleep-strange-solar-behavior-baffles-astrophysicists/

 SPACE — The sun’s current space-weather cycle is the most anaemic in 100 years, scientists say. Our star is now at “solar maximum”, the peak phase of its 11-year activity cycle. But this solar max is weak, and the overall current cycle, known as Solar Cycle 24, conjures up comparisons to the famously feeble Solar Cycle 14 in the early 1900s, researchers said. “None of us alive have ever seen such a weak cycle. So we will learn something”, Leif Svalgaard of Stanford University told reporters here today (Dec. 11) at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The learning has already begun. For example, scientists think they know why the solar storms that have erupted during Solar Cycle 24 have caused relatively few problems here on Earth. The sun often blasts huge clouds of superheated particles into space, in explosions known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Powerful CMEs that hit Earth squarely can trigger geomagnetic storms, which in turn can disrupt radio communications, GPS signals and power grids. 

But such effects have rarely been seen during Solar Cycle 24, even though the total number of CMEs hasn’t dropped off much, if at all. The explanation, researchers said, lies in the reduced pressure currently present in the heliosphere, the enormous bubble of charged particles and magnetic fields that the sun puffs out around itself. This lower pressure has allowed CMEs to expand greatly as they cruise through space, said Nat Gopalswamy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Indeed, Solar Cycle 24 CMEs are, on average, 38 percent bigger than those measured during the last cycle — a difference with real consequences for folks here on Earth. “When the CMEs expand more, the magnetic field inside the CMEs has lower strength,” Gopalswamy said. “So when you have lower-strength magnetic fields, then they cause milder geomagnetic storms.” –Space.com

At the end of Thanksgiving Day when the sun was setting over Sumterville, Florida, Paula Phillips took a break from her meal, stepped outside and saw something odd--a pair of luminous 'Vs' in the deepening twilight:

"I've never seen anything like this before," says Phillips. "I photographed the phenomenon with a simple small Samsung camera."

They're sun halos, caused by sunlight shining through ice crystals. Atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley explains:

"These two ‘V’ shaped halos, one rare and one common, change shape dramatically as the sun climbs," he says. "Near sunrise or sunset is the only time to catch them like this. The lower ‘V’ is an upper tangent arc from horizontal hexagonal prisms of ice. The upper one is a rare sunvex Parry arc from similar crystals that - strangely – are fixed so that two prism faces are always horizontal. In the full-sized image, we also see just a trace of a 22o halo and stretching upwards from the sun a sun pillar."

"I find it odd that I saw this in Florida!" continues Phillips. Yet Florida has ice crystal, too. The atmosphere 5 to 10 km above the Sunshine State is always cold enough for water to freeze.   "Florida and other warm places get plenty of halos--some of them exceedingly rare," says Cowley. "Look for them everywhere, winter and summer."            www.spaceweather.com

Cancel the funeral. Comet ISON is back from the dead. Yesterday, Nov. 28th, Comet ISON flew through the sun's atmosphere and appeared to disintegrate before the cameras of several NASA and ESA spacecraft. This prompted reports of the comet's demise. Today, the comet has revived and is rapidly brightening. Click here to view a SOHO coronagraph movie of the solar flyby (updated Nov. 29 @ 1800 UT):

Before the flyby, experts had made many predictions about what might happen to the comet, ranging from utter disintegration to glorious survival. No one predicted both.

Karl Battams of NASA's Comet ISON Observing Campaign says, "[colleague] Matthew Knight and I are ripping our hair out right now as we know that so many people in the public, the media and in science teams want to know what's happened. We'd love to know that too! Right now, here's our working hypothesis:

"As comet ISON plunged towards to the Sun, it began to fall apart, losing not giant fragments but at least a lot of reasonably sized chunks. There's evidence of very large dust in the long thin tail we saw in the [SOHO coronagraph] images. Then, as ISON plunged through the corona, it continued to fall apart and vaporize, losing its coma and tail completely just like sungrazing Comet Lovejoy did in 2011. What emerged from the Sun was a small but perhaps somewhat coherent nucleus that has resumed emitting dust and gas for at least the time being."

Battams emphasizes that it is too soon to tell how big the remnant nucleus is or how bright the resurgent comet will ultimately become. "We have a whole new set of unknowns, and this ridiculous, crazy, dynamic and unpredictable object continues to amaze, astound and confuse us no end. We ask that you please be patient with us for a couple of days as we analyze the data and try to work out what is happening."

Astrophotographer Babak Tafreshi has edited an HD video that compares views of ISON from both of SOHO's coronagraphs. "It seems the comet could become a naked eye object with several degrees of scattered tail by Dec 2nd or 3rd," he predicts. "It's not the comet of the century for sure, and fainter than the Lovejoy sungrazer in Dec. 2011, but an interesting imaging target is just a few nights away!"      www.spaceweather.com

On Nov. 5th at 22:12 UT, the magnetic canopy of sunspot AR1890 erupted, producing a brief but intense X3-class solar flare. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the extreme ultraviolet flash:

Radiation from the flare caused a surge in the ionization of Earth's upper atmosphere--and this led to a rare magnetic crochet. Alexander Avtanski observed the effect using a homemade magnetometer in San Jose, California.

A magnetic crochet is a disturbance in Earth's magnetic field caused by electrical currents flowing in air 60 km to 100 km above our heads. Unlike geomagnetic disturbances that arrive with CMEs days after a flare, a magnetic crochet occurs while the flare is in progress. They tend to occur during fast impulsive flares like this one.   More eruptions are in the offing.
www.spaceweather.com

Radio amateurs, have you heard any strange roaring sounds coming from the loudspeakers of your shortwave radios this week? It might have been the sun. "The Sun has been generating Type III solar radio bursts and they appear to be intensifying," reports amateur radio astronomer Thomas Ashcraft of New Mexico. "The strongest burst so far came at 2155 UTC on October 9th." Here it is as recorded on two radios at 28 MHz and 21 MHz:

Ashcraft recommends listening to the audio using stereo headphones. "Type III bursts drift downward in frequency," he explains. "In stereo you can hear the burst pass through 28 MHz first on one speaker and then flow through 21 MHz on the other sound speaker."

Type III solar radio bursts are produced by electrons accelerated to high energies (1 to 100 keV) by solar flares. As the electrons stream outward from the sun, they excite plasma oscillations and radio waves in the sun's atmosphere. When these radio waves head in the direction of Earth, they make themselves heard in the loudspeakers of shortwave radios around the dayside of the planet.

More radio bursts could be in the offing. NOAA forecasters estimate a 30% chance of M-class flares and a 5% chance of X-class flares during the next 24 hours.               www.spaceweather.com

Solar Cycle 24 is shaping up to be the weakest solar cycle in more than 50 years. In 2009, a panel of forecasters led by NOAA and NASA predicted a below-average peak. Now that Solar Max has arrived, however, it is even weaker than they expected. Look inside the yellow circle to see the shortfall:

It may be premature to declare Solar Cycle 24 underwhelming. Solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center thinks Solar Cycle 24 is double peaked--and the second peak is yet to come. Also, weak solar cycles have been known to produce very strong flares. The strongest solar storm in recorded history, the Carrington Event of 1859, occurred during a relatively weak solar cycle like this one.  Stay tuned for flares? Maybe, but not this week. Solar activity remains very low.   www.spaceweather.com

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Published on 30 Jun 2013

Spaceweather 102: http://youtu.be/JpIuXPmSalk
How to Watch the Sun: Spaceweather 101 - http://youtu.be/ld5ecZuHECA
The REAL Climate Changer: http://youtu.be/_yy3YJBOw_o
Ice Age Soon? http://youtu.be/UuYTcnN7TQk
An Unlikely but Relevant Risk - The Solar Killshot: http://youtu.be/X0KJ_dxp170

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June 29, 2013 – SPACE – Launched 36 years ago, the Voyager 1 spacecraft speeds at a rate of about a million miles a day, entering a bizarre and mysterious region more than 11 billion miles from Earth that scientists are struggling to make sense of. It’s a region where the fierce solar winds have all but vanished and pieces of atoms blasted across the galaxy by ancient supernovae drift into the solar system.

The NASA probe is causing scientists to question some long-standing theories on the nature of our solar system and life beyond its cold dark edge dubbed the “magnetic highway” –a newly discovered area of the heliosphere, the vast bubble of magnetism that shields the solar system from deadly cosmic rays. Scientists had long envisioned this outermost layer of the solar systems, the heliosheath, to be a curved, distinct boundary separating the solar system from the rest of the Milky Way where three things would happen: The sun’s solar winds would become quiet; galactic cosmic rays would bombard Voyager from every angle; and the direction of the dominant magnetic field would change significantly because it would be coming from interstellar space, not the sun.

“The models that have been thought to predict what should happen are all incorrect,” said physicist Stamatios Krimigis of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.   The latest readings from Voyager's instruments support none of those suppositions, scientists said. Voyager has reported solar winds suddenly dropped by half, while the strength of the magnetic field almost doubled, and those values then switched back and forth five times before they became fixed.

“The jumps indicate multiple crossings of a boundary unlike anything observed previously,” a team of Voyager scientists wrote in one a study. Voyager did detect the expected increase in galactic cosmic rays but found at times the rays were moving in parallel instead of traveling randomly. “This was conceptually unthinkable for cosmic rays,” Stamatios Krimigis, a solar physicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., told the Los Angeles Times. “There is no cosmic ray physicist I know who ever expected that they would not all be coming equally from all directions.”

Whether Voyager 1 — which launched in 1977 — has truly left the solar system has been a matter of some debate, because scientists have come up with competing theories on what constitutes an outermost edge. “We’re not free yet,” Krimigis said. “This is a new region that we didn’t know existed. We have no road map, and we’re waiting to see what’s going to happen next.” –Daily Galaxy
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2013/06/29/great-barriers-do-exist-in-space-and-voyager-may-have-reached-it-now-what/

Astronomers in the Netherlands have discovered a world where the sun is square. It is Earth. On June 6th Jan Koeman was watching the sunset from Lauwersoog, and this is what he saw:

"The sunset was a very weird one," says Koeman. "Inversions in the atmosphere gave it some very odd shapes."

UK atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley was in the Netherlands last week. "Conditions were favorable for this kind of mirage," he says. "To see weird miraged suns, look out at sunrise in very cold weather and at sunset when it is hot. We had beautiful hot sunny weather all last week in the Netherlands. The sun heated the land and topmost layers of the sea to generate by early evening strong temperature inversions, layers of unusually warm air beneath cooler air. The setting sun rays slanted through the layers where they were bent to form multiple image slices that combine into outlandish shapes and even stacked pancakes. Sometimes tiny green flashes can be photographed on the topmost pancake."

"I was looking for the green flash," adds Koeman, "but this time no success. More sunsets will follow."
www.spaceweather.com