April Fools, Coronal hole faces Earth

Tuesday, 2 April 2019 17:19 UTC

April Fools, Coronal hole faces Earth

Yesterday's article about NASA launching a satellite to close solar coronal holes in order to make human missions to Mars possible was of course the SpaceWeatherLive April Fools prank. It was entertaining to see all of your responses and a couple of you even fell for the prank. Great fun! If you missed the article and like a good laugh be sure to click here and give it a read.

But back to today. Space weather is relatively quiet at the moment. There is one small sunspot region on the disk with sunspot number 2737 but it is not complex enough to cause significant solar flare activity.

We do have a nice coronal hole facing our planet yesterday and today actually which will be of interest to high latitude sky watchers. We might start to feel the effects of it somewhere tomorrow. Active geomagnetic conditions or even minor G1 geomagnetic storm conditions should not be excluded following the arrival of this stream if we get optimal solar wind conditions at our planet.

Any mentioned solar flare in this article has a scaling factor applied by the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), the reported solar flares are 42% smaller than for the science quality data. The scaling factor has been removed from our archived solar flare data to reflect the true physical units.

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