SOLAR ACTIVITY REPORT: March 5, 2014:
View time-lapse compilation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94w3K1uCLl4
This is your solar activity report. It's March 5, 2014. Another 24 of hours of below average activity for where we should be in the solar cycle. The only producer of flaring right now, just like I predicted, is the now Beta-Gamma-Delta sunspot group 11991. I nicknamed it, 11990's evil little sister. Look who grew up quick, this grouping now has roughly 25 separate umbral units in it. If you look at a sunspot as if it were a nipple per-say, then the Umbra would be the nipple and the penumbra being the proverbial aureola. Now, if you don't what proverbial means, then I can't blame you for stopping this video prematurely. So surely, the good news is, it seems like it's now powering down. Plus I now think, it will be back in the beta-gamma magnetic class by tomorrow. My excitement however, now turns to the incoming sunspot group number 11974 as it's gigantic negative area in red and what looks like another beta-delta or beta-gamma-delta class beast of a sunspot is making me anxious and causing me to repeat check the SDO imagery throughout the day. We had a filament eruption yesterday but I couldn't bring it to you due to a crippling migraine. Seems we know more about quantum physics than headaches. But hey, treatments cost more than cures. Medicine is a business after all and their creed is profits before people. Good times. Looking at active coronal hole streams we have northern and southern earth facing coronal holes which are connected by a longitudinal coronal hole stream sliver. With the southern portion being significantly stronger than any coronal hole we've had in a while but luckily we don't share a magnetic connection with it for another 4 to 5 days and not with the center of that southern coronal hole but closer to that sliver I just mentioned. We still have filaments about the solar surface which are hard to spot because they don't emit an X-Ray flux when they depart sun as coronal mass ejections like the one we saw from yesterday. Solar wind over the last 2 days is stable at or below 400km/s with small and expected gusts to 500km/s, with the density also making the same expected fluctuations between 5 to 10. The Interplanetary Magnetic Field has been, as you've probably guessed, also taking small fluctuations over the last 48 hours with readings of the Vertical B-Field Vector falling between 5nT and -5nT. The GOES magnetometer is reading normal. Looking at the radio disturbance plot we see the everything has returned to quiet here on Earth for the most part in terms of charged particles from the sun at least, for now. This can change at anytime and sometimes does when we least expect it. I will say this, the sun looks angrier now than it did in the last couple weeks. Look at this spectacular polar plasma dancing and some of it leaving the sun as a polar CME. The miracles of nature. Proton count is baseline and electron flux is showing tiny disturbances. KP index is between 3 and 2 which is expected given the current electron slash proton flux situation. So over the next 24 hours it's all eyes on Beta-Gamma-Delta sunspot group 11991, will it fire one big one off before it powers down to Beta-Gamma? Or will it gain strength again? I'm gonna go with the weakening. Either way we have to wait and see, this is still a developing science. Amazing stuff.

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