Northern Lights In Marysville, WA

A time-lapse video of the Northern Lights, as seen from my back deck on Sunday night, September 30. This is one of the best light shows I've seen from here.
These lights were the result of the 2nd of two CME's (Coronal Mass Ejection), caused by a solar flare erupting on the Sun two days earlier......

JUST A SPECK?

Ok, folks....this tiny little speck on the Sun is STILL a little bit bigger than Earth. Consider that there are 7 BILLION of us packed onto a grain of sand.... (click image for a larger version).

SUN BLOG SEPTEMBER 30

It looks like we're in for a (mostly) sunny week ahead. There has been some minor solar flare activity on the western limb (right edge) of the Sun over the past couple of days, so I think I will spend the day watching and photographing the action.
Below, is a visible-light image of the Sun, showing two large sunspots. I've included the approximate size of the largest one.

 

Below, is another image of the Sun, showing it in Hydrogen-alpha wavelength. This wavelength is not visible to the human eye, but shows many features and activity.  The circled region is where the current Xray solar flares are occuring, while the inset graph shows the plot of Xray activity as monitored by an environmental satellite (GOES-15).

***REMEMBER.....NEVER LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN WITHOUT PROPER FILTERING DEVICES!!!!  PERMANENT EYE DAMAGE MAY OCCUR!