A CME IS COMING--MAYBE TWO: A G1 geomagnetic storm watch is in effect as one and maybe two CMEs approach Earth. The first CME is almost a sure thing. It will probably deliver a glancing blow on Oct. 2nd. The second CME is less certain. It is faint and less well aimed, but could make itself felt as a near-miss on Oct. 4th. Stay tuned for high-latitude auroras during the first week of October. CME Impact Alerts: SMS Text
SPACE WEATHER DELAYS AN ENGLISH TRAIN: Research into the origins of space weather has led scholars to a strange place: An express train in England. Date: Oct. 18, 1848.
A new paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Space Weather examines a curious 16-minute delay almost 180 years ago. At the Exeter platform, passengers sat motionless from 10:05 pm to 10:21 pm because signalers couldn't confirm that the track was clear.
A sunspot was to blame. Just as the train was scheduled to leave the station, a geomagnetic storm interfered with the telegraph system. Electric currents surged through the wires, and the needles signalers used to check the line swung wildly.
The next morning, British clergyman Temple Chevallier sketched a huge sunspot group facing Earth. A month later, when the same sunspot group came around again, auroras lit up the skies of Italy. On Nov. 17, 1848, telegraph instruments between Florence and Pisa jammed just as they had done in Exeter.
All of this took place 11 years before the Carrington Event--a September 1859 solar super-storm sometimes called "the birth of space weather." Solar flares were discovered during the Carrington Event when Richard Carrington saw the bloom of a flare on his solar projection screen.
Before you memorize 1848, however, consider the previous year. On March 19, 1847, railway engineer William Barlow noticed something strange on the Midland Railway near Derby, England. "A brilliant aurora was seen," he reported to the Royal Society, "and during the whole time, strong alternating deflections occurred on all [our telegraph] instruments."
The authors of the new paper believe that is the first documented case of the sun interfering with human tech. The "Barlow Event," anyone?
Read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1029/2026SW005239
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THE ALIEN MIND SCULPTURE: The brains of octopuses are so different from ours, they're often called "alien minds." That makes the Alien Mind Sculpture more than a blown-glass paperweight -- it’s a fascinating conversation piece inspired by one of nature’s strangest and smartest creatures. Bonus: It has been to space:
You can have it for $149.95. On July 30, 2026, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus launched this sculpture onboard a cosmic ray research balloon. For 3 hours, it floated more than 105,000 feet above the Sierra Nevada mountains of central California while cosmic ray sensors inside the payload gathered data for our radiation monitoring program.
It comes with a full-color gift card showing the octopus floating at the top of Earth's atmosphere. The interior of the card tells the story of the flight and where it landed.
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Every night, a network
of
NASA
all-sky cameras scans the skies above the United
States for meteoritic fireballs. Automated software
maintained by NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office
calculates their orbits, velocity, penetration depth
in Earth's atmosphere and many other characteristics.
Daily results are presented here on Spaceweather.com.
On September 28, 2026, the network reported 6 fireballs.
(6 sporadics)
In this diagram of the inner solar system, all of the fireball orbits intersect at a single point--Earth. The orbits are color-coded by velocity, from slow (red) to fast (blue).
[Larger image] [movies]
Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (
PHAs)
are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that
can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the
known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet,
although astronomers are finding
new
ones all the time.
On October 1, 2026 there were 2349 potentially hazardous asteroids.
Recent
& Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters: