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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."
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.
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
...how far down the US will the Aurora Borealis be showing?
This article says maybe as far as the southern US.
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...
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Crudely Drawn Games
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.
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
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
What *I* can't understand is why people think that reference books (even Internet ones) are up to date and provide indebatable evidence or proof. They are at best a snapshot of word meanings by a single author or group. The simple fact is that language constantly changes and sometimes you end up with terms that should be opposites (flammable and inflammable) but actually mean the same thing.
Since you seem interested, I refer you to this periodical or even better, this public radio site and specifically the letter that people send in and the responses. You may or may not like it.
This comment is guaranteed*
*not guaranteed
Well, if there are auroras to be seen this far south we'll never see 'em.
I live in Riverside, CA, just 12 miles south of San Berdoo. We've not seen the sun in going on near a week. It's common to see the sun blotted out for 30 minutes or so at a time when fires happen but to see it gone for days at a time is strange to say the least. Right now, at 11:28pm it looks like a thick fog is moving through but it's smoke. Many of us with respitory problems are misserable to say the least.
It's not worth bitching about though after seeing what's happened in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mnts and much lower than that. You'd need to live here to apreciate just how far the fire has burned. It's gone clear out to La Verne and beyond, two couties away. That's about 26 miles in one line. Worse yet, the fire is just now getting to the edge of a thick forest that has much dry and dead wood due to restricted logging and a very bad bark beetle infestation. I go hiking, camping and mountain biking up there often and over the past few years, and have been doing so for the past 15 years, one can crest any hill and see acres and miles of brown where there was once green.
IMHO, it's environmentalism gone wrong. And now, there's many folks, some of whom I know personaly, out of a house. I've spent much time in the neighborhoods that have burned, These are not even places you'd expect to see get leveled but they have been. They're well out of the mountains and still, they've burned. As I write this I'm brushing bits of ash from my ibook keyboard and I don't even have the windows open. I'm not trying to be dramatic, just telling it as it is from the locals POV.
Odd stuff. I hope it ends fairly soon. I have friends directly afected by this who are now waiting it out in motels or friend and/or relatives places. I hope it all works out for them. BTW, one of the major hiways, I15, has been getting shut down almost daily. Many folks out here live out in the high desert above Cajon pass and commute that thing daily down to the valley for work. It's only about an added 45 minutes/45 miles to their drive but when it kills your work day it sucks. When we get bad snow up in the pass it sometimes gets shut down for part of a day or so but not usually for days at a time. I15 is a major artery between LA, Vegas, and beyond. I hope it all works out. I feel very fortunate I've not been affected other than crappy allergy problems. I really have nothing to bitch about for myself and feel kinda guilty.
Sorry for the rant, just trying to give a local's view of things.
PEACE!
Chuck
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.
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!