AURORA WATCH:

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 AURORA WATCH: A solar wind stream is heading for Earth and it could cause a geomagnetic storm when it arrives on April 21st or 22nd. Sky watchers from Scandinavia to Alaska should be alert for auroras.

The stream is flowing from this coronal hole:



Coronal holes are places in the sun's atmosphere where the sun's magnetic field opens up and allows solar wind to escape. These holes appear black in ultraviolet and X-ray images of the sun. The image above, which shows a large coronal hole opening directly toward Earth, was taken this morning by an extreme ultraviolet telescope onboard the SOHO spacecraft.

AURORA WATCH:

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http://www.sec.noaa.gov/alerts/alerts_timeline.html

Space Weather Alerts


http://www.sec.noaa.gov/SWN/index.html

Space Weather Now

I have been thinking about seeing signs in the stars. Did you all see the story about the storm on Saturn. It has been going for about 40 years, and it is shaped like a perfect hexagon. It's like a giant super hurricane on one of the planet's polls. With this, Mars heating up, and solar storms, should we not expect cataclysm on Earth, too?

So much about human beings, making global warming. Humans do not, live on Mars.

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The saturn storm, I posted about.

One of the most bizarre weather patterns known has been photographed at Saturn, where astronomers have spotted a huge, six-sided feature circling the north pole.

Instead of the normally sinuous or circular cloud structures seen on all planets that have atmospheres, this thing is a hexagon.

The honeycomb-like feature has been seen before. NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft imaged it more than two decades ago. Now, having spotted it with the Cassini spacecraft, scientists conclude it is a long-lasting oddity.

"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

"We've never seen anything like this on any other planet," he added. "Indeed, Saturn's thick atmosphere, where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate, is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is."

The hexagon is nearly 15,000 miles (25,000 kilometers) across. Nearly four Earths could fit inside it.

Thermal imagery shows the hexagon extends about 60 miles (100 kilometers) down into the clouds.

At Saturn's south pole, Cassini recently spotted a freaky human eye-like feature that resembles a hurricane.

"It's amazing to see such striking differences on opposite ends of Saturn's poles," said Bob Brown, team leader of the Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer at the University of Arizona. "At the south pole we have what appears to be a hurricane with a giant eye, and at the north pole of Saturn we have this geometric feature, which is completely different."

The hexagon appears to have remained fixed with Saturn's rotation rate and axis since first glimpsed by Voyager 26 years ago. The actual rotation rate of Saturn is still uncertain, which means nobody knows exactly how long the planet's day is.

"Once we understand its dynamical nature, this long-lived, deep-seated polar hexagon may give us a clue to the true rotation rate of the deep atmosphere and perhaps the interior," Baines said.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,262084,00.html