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NASA's Earth Observatory Shows Solar Flare
staaktdenarbeid writes "In the past few months I became very impressed with the timeliness and quality of NASA's Earth Observatory. When hurricane Isabel struck, their imagery showed me the biggest latte ever made. Now that Southern California is on fire, it takes only a look from outer space to see how bad the sitation really is. And, today, a massive solar flare showed up on their website as soon as it errupted (so to speak). Each of these pictures is accompanied by detailed technical background. And for the rest of us, they also make perfect screen backgrounds. Very cool."
Isnt this just a reapeat?
My first reaction.
"Oooh. A Red Story."
Making my Slashdollars count.
Hope there's some aurora to see in the sky early Wednesday morning.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
In the past few months I became very impressed with the timeliness and quality of NASA's Earth Observatory
In the past few months, I've been impressed with how much of my money the government receives, and as much as I appreciate good science, I'd much rather spend a bit more of that money myself.
It's rare to see a agency funded by government bureaucracy that actually works well.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire"... I fell into a burning ring of fire.. I went down down down and the flames crept higher...and it burns burns burns.
Maybe it's cause the solar flares cause my bald head to dry out and itch and burn. I should know better to go outside without my foil lined cap.
B
Of course, this solar flare calls for the obligatory Star Trek joke:
If this were Star Trek, we'd all be dead when the solar flare hits.
That said, the ground images from the Terra satellites are nothing short of amazing. Since I live in Southern California, it really put a perspective on things.
and better yet, just go to some recent aurora pics to see what this one probably will look like...
Every time the Sun burps, we up here get a little antsy. The problem is that although we have quite a bit of shielding protecting us from most of the bombardment, the ozone is pretty thin. Certainly, it's not a massive hole like down at the South Pole, but it's definitely noticeable at these latitudes.
It's gotten to the point that we have to wear sunscreen when going outdoors or risk of getting a severe sunburn. It's double the problem because of all the snow which reflects the UV.
But the UV issue really isn't either here or there in regards to this story, which I was hoping to eventually bring the shielding point back around to.
The shielding that we've got is pretty thick, but no match for the massive amount of neutrinos and other charged particles that we are bombarded by. Luckily we've got the VA Radiation Belt as a natural shield.
There ought to be a nice show tonight in the skies!
These rampant fires may be wreaking havoc upon insurance companies, but just remember, it is all part of nature. This catastrophe serves to remind us humans we are part of nature, not above it.
Despite how horrific they appear to be, they serve some beneficial role in the grand scheme of things.
Bla bla bla
It's really strange to see all this about a solar flare, when this was just published. Weird.
I meta-mod all positive moderation Unfair, because it's abuse of the system.
...how far down the US will the Aurora Borealis be showing?
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
there are nice things to look at outside, too. sometimes the smaller side of nature is just as memorizing as the big picture. I fear for myself when I spend days looking at the world on a monitor. eh, that's what geekhood is all about.
spacefem.com
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
Your taxdollars are *really* at work now.
that the public could realise how useful NASA is. If they could see the services that they offer, maybe it would be "politically correct" for Congrees to give them the funding that they need.
New images of the xray sun are being taken by the SXI imager once again. Use of the imager had stopped because of an unexpected over-current problem. The SXI team decided that they could safely operate the instrument at a lower voltage, albeit at the expense of a lower signal to noise ratio. The decision was hastened by the dramatic solar events today.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
You can see a pretty cool before picture (note, by before, I mean _yesterday_)...
Before
And now, check out the after (today):
After
If not, we would be Tater Tots in about 10 hours or so. Really, though, without an electromagnetic field, our planet would pretty much be blasted by the "solar wind" to the point that Mars or Venus would look like a vacation area compared to that version of hell. Another point not to forget is the ozone shield which filters out most UV radiation, where no shield was good at first (to cause mutations into higher lifeforms, like plants, but is now bad) but now is essential to not irradiate humans into extinction. Of course CO2 is bad/good because it will raise/lower global temperatures soon/never so our lives will be altered now/never. This last part is motly right.
Or did we just manage to /. nasa (ok, so this page at nasa, but still)? Or is it normally this unresponsive? If they can't take on /. and survive, maybe they shouldn't be put in charge of so much sensitive equipment/rocket fuel...
====
Crudely Drawn Games
CA -- really big
Isabella -- not so big
This page has a similar picture. It is from NASA's SEAWIFS project. It shows the same fires in a larger area and zoomed out to give a better perspective. Click on the smaller picture to get a gigantic version of the smaller one.
under an hour after being posted, the site is already slower than dial-up... side of slashdot, anyone?
At least that's what the local weather guru said on the 10PM news. Said it should be sometime between 12PM and 2AM CST (GMT -6). Despite having an early meeting with clients tomorrow, I am staying up and a awaiting the show...
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Uh, if tomorrow's the apocalypse, it's been a good run, y'all. It's been a lotta fun.
"Since the dawn of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun!" - Mr. Burns.
Now it looks like the sun will destroy us! I'll shield my computer with my ashen body so that it might survive.
Electric Monkey Pants
I still can't understand why so many people in the U S of A (yes, it's the only country so far where I've heard such an abbreviation) keep calling milk what in fact is caffelatte...
Article on solar flares and power outages.
...in the earth itself, and in long distance conductors. The interaction of the [Coronal Mass Ejection] with the Earth is referred to as a geomagnetic storm."
... Typical undesirable effects range from voltage regulation difficulties, to highly nonlinear sinusoidal primary and secondary currents, resulting in circuit breaker tripping; to creation of local hot spots within the transformer, resulting in transformer failure. ... The effects of [Geomagnetically Induced Currents] were dramatically demonstrated during March 1989, when GIC caused a cascading failure in the Quebec Power system, putting nearly nine million customers in the dark, in less than 90 seconds."
"If (when) this flow of charged particles and embedded magnetic field collides with the Earth, it dramatically disrupts Earth's geomagnetic field and ionosphere, changing the terrestrial magnetic fields, and therefore causing currents to flow in the upper ionosphere,
"This current can cause saturation of the large power transformers at either end of the transmission line, creating a host of undesirable effects.
(Note that this first page is a direct link to a frame, the second through sixth frames are accessible by the "next" tags in the right-hand corners.)
Take off, every Hoser
I was always disappointed that Brando got that role, and not Elmer Fudd, for whom it was written.
"I dweamed of a snaiw cwawing acwoss the edge of a wazor. That is my dweam, that is my nightmawe. Eh-h-h-h-h!"
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
From the article:
Today's flare is listed as an X17.2, with an X20 being the most intense flare ever observed in that time. People living in Quebec, Canada, may recall that in March 1989 an X15 solar storm was strong enough to knock out the region's power grid.
Our ADSL network and our mail server have been really flaky lately (for other reasons, I presume). I don't think that our customers are going to believe us if this causes problems with our network.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
This time McNealy has gone way too far... He really has to go.
You couldn't see a solar flare "as soon as it erupted". It takes about 8 minutes for the light to reach Earth from the Sun. So if the Sun went supernova right now, you'd still have time to read this comment and make a coffee before you knew anything about it :-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
as soon as it errupted (so to speak). No, we see the flare a few minutes after it occurs thanks to the limit on the speed of light. And I think a flare is detectable and visible without a satellite. A big one is detectable by the sudden improvement or detoriation in radio quality.
... and there's no high building around me.
Tough luck.
Well, I just drove out 50 miles east of Anchorage toward Portage Glacier and found a beautiful display of the Aurora Borealis. First it was a bit green, then later on, I had curtains of bright green, purple and red cascading around me. It was fantastic, and it was only 2:30am, the full blown impact hasn't even hit yet... tomorrow night should be nice.
"This is you left and that's your left. This is your right and that's your right. You're gonna die!
I was just out at Camp Pendelton last week. I saw the smoke from the wild fire that is burning there now. It was still somewhat small. I asked one of the Marines how bad it was. He said "It's no big deal we should have it under control in a few days". Guess they didn't.
A friend who lives in San Diego told me, "It's like living in Hell. The sky is black, and we have to wear masks to go outside."
Actually, the MODIS data of the fires is at 250 m/pixel--well below SPOT's 5m/pixel. The highest resolution data NASA is allowed to acquire (by Congressional statute, I believe) is 15m/pixel. 15m LANDSAT and ASTER data are available to the public for a fee from the USGS, and some scenes are available from a variety of sources for free (http://glcf.umiacs.umd.edu/index.shtml) Any higher res data would (in theory) compete with commercial sector. Ironic since the federal government (primarily DoD) pays the commercial sector $5 million a year for high res data from Ikonos and Quickbird. State and local governments shell out more.
Military satellites (which don't officially exist) may have resolutions of 10cm/pixel.
Got this in the mail this morning. The CME has hit. HF radio communications are in da gutta!
CME HAS HIT. Kp index threshold was
reached on 2003 Oct 29 0839 UTC.
Gorkman
I'm the Earth Observatory site designer, and my boss is the Terra Project Scientist-i.e. he's in charge of the satellite that carries MODIS. We work closely with the MODIS rapid response team (http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/) who are doing the heavy lifting on data processing (and in turn they rely on the MODIS science team for algorithm development for such things as atmospheric corrections). We do captioning, image annotations, some visualizations, and publishing. The site is the result of a collaboration bewtween a lot of people at NASA. The forest service is more of a data user than data producer.
How many Nasa.gov sites can be /.'d at once I wonder?
Bush Lies On the Record.
Is anyone capturing Iridium performance data during this upcoming solar storm?
I had to refresh the page solar flare page about 10 times, and am still trying to get the fires to load. connection keeps timing out.
Especially considering that's TWO examples of the 430 Active Nuclear Power Plants in the world!
Seriously, now, do try to be a little less alarmist in the future.
I thought public smoking was banned in California.
http://www.informit.com/content/images/0672322803/ 0672322803.jpg
From space.com
"The coronal mass ejection is one in a series sent out by two huge sunspots, the largest pair to grace the Sun at one time in recent memory. Sunspot 486 was responsible for this blast."
I knew those 486 machines we have been binning would have their revenge one day..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"