It's been a busy week for solar activity with more powerful solar flares and geomagnetic storm possibilities in the forecast. A parade of solar activity continues to flow from the sun this week, opening up more chances to spot the aurora across the United States this weekend. On Thursday morning (Sept. 12), a sunspot region that has not been numbered yet made its presence known blasting off a X1.3 class solar flare. X-class solar flares are the most powerful of their kind, and are typically followed by a full or partial loss of high frequency (HF) radio signals for sunlit locations on our planet. The energetic eruption, which peaked at 5:43 AM EDT (943 UTC), brought impacts earlier this morning with communication bands across Africa, Europe, and parts of Asia. Forecasters at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center will continue to analyze the data to confirm how many more CMEs could reach Earth's magnetic field both from the X-class flare and also a group of M-class flares (the second strongest in class) also generated early Thursday by two previous sunspots, or Active Regions (AR), designated AR 3811 and AR 3814.