On Tue, 28 Oct 2003, Trisha wrote: > In case anybody is interested, we do have a very large solar flare > heading straight for us. It's the third largest solar flare on record, > and erupted on Tuesday, and is expected to "arrive" at Earth mid-day > Wednesday (tomorrow). > > These severe flares have the ability to disrupt satellite radio > communications and Earth based electrical systems. (Sounds like the GPS > may be off that day if you try to geocache....) I'm not sure if GPS signals will be disrupted - these sorts of affects are highly dependent on wavelength of the transmission. But certainly there is a chance of all sorts of different types of radio transmissions being affected. > And I quote: "It's headed straight for us like a freight train." says > John Kohl, a Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics scientist. It's always fun to hear the experts talk about their subject and see how the press interprets their words - usually trying to find the most spectacular sentence for the best sound bite. I'm no expert on the Sun, but I did spend some time when in high school drawing sunspots after school every day that I could. I'd drag my telescope out into the back yard and sketch the location of sunspots and if they were big or unusual, I'd draw a closeup view. Even though I was in Seattle at the time, there was almost always a break in the clouds that lasted long enough for me to get my sketch in and it was fun to watch the spots march around the sun as the sun rotates. I'd simply project the sun's image onto a sheet of paper that I had pre-drawn circles onto and then with my pencil, trace the locations of the spots. It was great fun and I probably did that for most of my senior year of high school. > Now I am just your average joe-blow citizen when it comes to really > technical scientific things, but to have that guy, who should really know > LOTS about it, say it THAT WAY....I don't know....makes me nervous! > Anybody else catch that? For us "Landlubbers" on planet Earth, we shouldn't worry about any direct affects of this flare. The Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere does an excellent job of protecting us. I think even the two crewmen on the Space Station are even safe since they orbit so close to the Earth that the magnetic fields divert most of the charged particles from the sun and the metal spacecraft walls do the rest. > check out www.spaceweather.com and put on the OPAQUE sunscreen!! That's an excellent website and it even mentions stuff I work on in the "Near Earth Asteroid" section. And, BTW, sunscreen won't protect you from the flare products, but as I said above, you should already have plenty of protection thanks to mother Earth.... The actual luminosity of the sun (how much light it puts out) is not affected significantly by flares. > Trisha "Lightning" > Prescott Jim. Jim Scotti Lunar & Planetary Laboratory University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721 USA http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/