DUST OF THE ORION NEBULA Image Credit & Copyright: Raul Villaverde Fraile

What surrounds a hotbed of star formation? In the case of the Orion Nebula -- dust. The entire Orion field, located about 1600 light years away, is inundated with intricate and picturesque filaments of dust. Opaque to visible light, dust is created in the outer atmosphere of massive cool stars and expelled by a strong outer wind of particles. The Trapezium and other forming star clusters are embedded in the nebula. The intricate filaments of dust surrounding M42 and M43 appear brown in the featured image, while central glowing gas is highlighted in red. Over the next few million years much of Orion's dust will be slowly destroyed by the very stars now being formed, or dispersed into the Galaxy.

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AR2473 In White Light Taken by Honor Wheeler on December 12, 2015 @ Wilmington,Kent,UK.

SUNSPOT AR2473 Taken by Pavel Hajek on December 28, 2015 @ Louny, Czech Republic

BIG SUNSPOT ERUPTS

After several days of pent-up quiet, big sunspot AR2473 erupted on Dec. 28th (12:49 UT), producing a slow but powerful M1.9-class solar flare. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the blast's extreme ultraviolet glow:

For more than an hour, UV radiation from the flare bathed the top of Earth's atmosphere, ionizing atoms and molecules. This, in turn, disrupted the normal propagation of shortwave radio signals on the dayside of our planet. A NOAA blackout map shows the affected area. Ham radio operators, mariners and aviators in South America, Africa and the south Atlantic Ocean may have noticed fades and blackouts of transmissions below 20 MHz.

The slow explosion also produced a coronal mass ejection (CME). Images from the Solar and Heliospheric Obseratory (SOHO) show a ragged, full-halo CME heading almost directly toward Earth:

The storm cloud will likely reach our planet on Dec. 31st, possibly triggering the first geomagnetic storm of the New Year. NOAA analysts are modeling this CME now; stay tuned for refined forecasts later today when they release their storm track.

Sunspot AR2374 has an unstable 'beta-gamma' magnetic field that could explode again in the hours ahead. NOAA forecasters estimate a 55% chance of additional M-class flares and a 10% chance of X-flares on Dec. 28th.