NASA & ESA - SOHO Mission patch.
June 24, 2015
Images above: Two views of the CME on June 20, 2015 from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO. Earth-directed CMEs like this one are often called halo CMEs, because the material shooting off from the sun looks like a ring around the disk of the sun. This halo can be seen more clearly in the right-hand image called a difference image, which is created by subtracting two consecutive frames to see how the image has changed. Images Credits: ESA&NASA/SOHO.
Earth experienced a geomagnetic storm on June 22, 2015 due to the arrival of an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection, or CME, from June 20.
The CME originated at 10:24 p.m. EDT on June 20, 2015. Coronal material exploded from the sun at about 780 miles per second, arriving at Earth at 1:59 p.m. EDT on June 22.
Image above: Aurora as seen 30 miles west of Philadelphia, PA on June 23, 2015. Image Credit: Courtesy of Jeff Berkes.
NOAA rated the resulting geomagnetic storm as G4, or severe. To see how this event affected Earth, visit NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center at http://spaceweather.gov, the U.S. government's official source for space weather forecasts, alerts, watches and warnings.
Image above: "My first Aurora! Three brilliant, visible-to-naked-eye, displays of pink-hued Aurora with the last ending around 1:30 a.m. What an unforgettable sight at 38 degrees latitude!" said Michael Charnick of Calhoun County Park, WV. Image Credit: Courtesy of Michael Charnick.
A geomagnetic storm happens when the plasma and magnetic fields in a CME interact with Earth’s magnetic field, disturbing the magnetosphere and allowing stored plasma to flow towards the magnetic poles.
Image above: Aurora as seen in Louisa, Virginia on June 23, 2015. Image Credit: Courtesy of David Murr.
The same active region produced two other CMEs in the past few days, which were pushed along by the faster Earth-directed CME from June 20.
Image above: "The most intense aurora I've ever seen. It started with a wall of light between Lake Preston and DeSmet, South Dakota, while the moon was still out." Image Credit: Courtesy of Christian Begeman.
As a result of the geomagnetic storm, aurora were sighted in several mid-latitude locations, including Virginia in the United States and in the United Kingdom.
Related Links:
High Resolution Media: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11905
For more information about Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/soho/index.html and http://sci.esa.int/soho/ and http://soho.esac.esa.int/
Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Sarah Frazier/Susan Hendrix/Holly Zell.
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