Our Sun Has Bad Aim with Storms to the East & West | Solar Storm Forecast 09.15.2020

This week our Sun continues to fire solar storms, but with some terrible aim! One in particular that launched to the west of Earth gave us in a beautiful display in coronagraphs. The source of this storm was not visible on the Earth-facing Sun, but it likely came from the filament regions we watched cross through our field of view last week. Sadly, the bright regions that fired the other non-Earth directed solar storms have since fizzled and we are hovering at the low edge of marginal-to-poor radio propagation this week on earth’s dayside. We do have another bright region that will rotate into Earth- view in a few days, but it may only give us a slight boost in the solar flux so amateur radio operators will just have to hang in there this week. Meanwhile we also have a remnant coronal hole rotating into the Earth-strike zone over the next couple days that will send us a burst of fast wind. This should give aurora photographers at high latitudes a bit of a show, especially by mid week. Overall. though the storm is expected to be pretty mild. This is good news for GPS reception, which should be good everywhere, except possibly near the aurora. Learn the details of the near misses, catch up on aurora photos from recent solar storms, and see what else our Sun has in store this week!