02/23/2015 – Ephemeris – The Launch of the DSCOVR satellite

Ephemeris for Monday, February 23rd.  The sun will rise at 7:30.  It’ll be up for 10 hours and 51 minutes, setting at 6:22.   The moon, 2 days before first quarter, will set at 12:24 tomorrow morning.

On Wednesday the 11th the DSCOVR satellite was launched to a special point between the Earth and the Sun called the Lagrangian point 1 or the Earth-Sun L1 point.  It’s a point of gravitational equilibrium between the Earth and the Sun, about a million miles sun-ward of the Earth, or four times the distance of the Moon.  It will take the craft over 100 days to get there, which it will slowly orbit.  It will act as an early warning sentinel, replacing the aging ACE spacecraft.  It will give us about an hour’s warning of incoming coronal mass ejections or CMEs erupting from the Sun.  It also has an earth pointing camera with various filters pointed to the full earth and occasionally the far side of the new Moon.

Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan.  They may be different for your location.

Addendum

SpaceX Falcon 9 V1.1 first stage burns to launch DSCOVR to the Earth-Sun L1 point. Credit: NASA.  Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge

Earth-Sun Lagrangian Points. Source: Wikimedia Commons, Xander89. Click to enlarge.

05/14/2013 – She’ll be coming ’round the sun when she comes

AR 1748 is near the sun’s eastern limb.  Already it has caused three radio blackouts.  AR means active region, read sunspot group.  It’s been kicking up quite a ruckus as it’s poised to rotate onto the earth facing side of the  sun.  this afternoon spaceweather.com‘s servers appear to be overloaded.  I was able to get into the governments NOAA spaceweather website for the latest information.

We could be in for a week of so of northern lights.  More later.