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DANDY magnetic storm yesterday. Kp=7 for a time. The UK got absolutely historic aurora. Do check out the photos.

Once again, enhanced solar wind, not a flare. That seems to be the story of post-peak Cycle 24.

Equinoxes are good for aurora. You get more bang for the solar buck. ShineOn, you must love aurora. The colors are the emission lines of different gases at different levels of the atmosphere. That's why the color is so pure. It's good stuff.

_________________
"Words are the new bullets, satellites the new artillery"
--"Winning CNN Wars," Army War College

"One bomb was shown on TV, and the American people bought that war. War is show business."
--"Wag the Dog"

Most definitely.

Seems like my life is largely dedicated to increasing our understanding of this thing we call light...or more properly, "electromagnetic radiation".

That's a most worthy endeavor.

_________________
"Words are the new bullets, satellites the new artillery"
--"Winning CNN Wars," Army War College

"One bomb was shown on TV, and the American people bought that war. War is show business."
--"Wag the Dog"

BIG ASS sunspot.

Clearly visible on the setting sun just as it goes below the horizon, which of course is the only time you look at it without approved protection, OK? Actually this one's so damn big it might show on a pinhole image. Poke a little hole in cardboard, project on white paper. Maybe I'll try it today.

No threat of flares from this one... yet... it's not magnetically complex. Just a big round hole in the sun.

We go in and out of G1 conditions, with (getting repetitious) aurora like no one's ever seen, but it's all from solar wind, not flares.

_________________
"Words are the new bullets, satellites the new artillery"
--"Winning CNN Wars," Army War College

"One bomb was shown on TV, and the American people bought that war. War is show business."
--"Wag the Dog"

Now the big ass sunspot is making piddly little C-class flares. Pretty weenie.

_________________
"Words are the new bullets, satellites the new artillery"
--"Winning CNN Wars," Army War College

"One bomb was shown on TV, and the American people bought that war. War is show business."
--"Wag the Dog"

About 5 minutes after I left home for a concert yesterday afternoon, the big sunspot produced a perfectly respectable class M flare. It blew out radio propagation over the Pacific Ocean for a brief time, not that it's been all that great to begin with.

There was an associated CME, but not believed to be earthward.

_________________
"Words are the new bullets, satellites the new artillery"
--"Winning CNN Wars," Army War College

"One bomb was shown on TV, and the American people bought that war. War is show business."
--"Wag the Dog"

The CME was not directed at us, but obviously it doesn't take much to cause problems with such technology.

The Solar Flares.
They were great at Woodstock.

_________________
The vessel with the pestle, has the pill with the poison:
the flagon with the dragon, has the brew that is true!

I’m just here for the Rapture of it all.

Dandy magnetic storm with G3 periods. Truly spectacular aurora in Norway (no surprise) and Washington state (big surprise).

As usual, coronal holes and negative Bz, not flares. The x-ray in fact has been flatlined for weeks.

_________________
"Words are the new bullets, satellites the new artillery"
--"Winning CNN Wars," Army War College

"One bomb was shown on TV, and the American people bought that war. War is show business."
--"Wag the Dog"

We're spotnil as many days as not. It's all downhill from here.

No spots... no flares. Of course, other things can cause disturbances on Earth.

You wanna see a REAL aurora, check out the data from Juno, which reaches Jupiter orbit on July 4th. Providing it works. RF takes 48 minutes to get back to Earth, so the spacecraft is highly autonomous and we just wait and see. When we'll know it reached the proper orbit comes right in the middle of 4th of July here. It's getting dark, and time to watch the bang bang.

_________________
"Words are the new bullets, satellites the new artillery"
--"Winning CNN Wars," Army War College

"One bomb was shown on TV, and the American people bought that war. War is show business."
--"Wag the Dog"

Well, what a wonderful coincidence that is...just in time for our latest model of interstellar satellites:


Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Love it.

Or Son of Flubber. Lighter car, probably better mileage.

Jovian aurora really is fun stuff. The currents between the planet's surface and the Galilean satellites are especially entertaining. Sometimes you can hear the resulting RF on a ten meter ham radio.

_________________
"Words are the new bullets, satellites the new artillery"
--"Winning CNN Wars," Army War College

"One bomb was shown on TV, and the American people bought that war. War is show business."
--"Wag the Dog"

http://www.spaceacademy.net.au/museum/RA50.htm

The third significant event was the accidental discovery by Bernard Burke and Kenneth Franklin of the Carnegie Institute in Washington, of radio noise emanating from the planet Jupiter. This discovery, made in 1955, was completely unexpected. The planets became alive, if not in a biological sense, then certainly in a physical one. This awareness has continued through the more intimate investigation of the solar system by spacecraft. The interaction between Jupiter's magnetic field and the moon Io to produce the chorus of radio waves first heard in 1955 at around 20 MHz is still being debated.

[snip][end]


Looks like 20 MHz (frequency) corresponds to a wavelength of about 15 m...so the 10 m portion of the spectrum would likely still be heavily impacted by such interference.


Okay, fuck that "maybe" shit...let's do the calculation:

speed of light = frequency X wavelength (in a vacuum where the index of refraction can be taken as unity).

3x10^10 cm/sec = (20x10^6/sec)*wavelength --> wavelength = 1500 cm = 15 m

Voila!

Yup, decametric waves. HF. Tends to favor the high end of HF in this case, that's the 15 and 10 meter bands for ham radio. Those bands are prone to all sorts of weird noises, and some come from Jupiter.

Like most radio astronomy, it doesn't sound all that great through a speaker. In fact, it sounds like the kind of noise you get on HF anyway, without the static crackle (lightning) and the various human-made hums and buzzes that are pulsed or amplitude modulated at the power line frequency.

I demonstrated this at a picnic once, just about this time of year, when the comet had broken up and was going into Jupiter and exciting the auroral plasma and (IIRC) perturbing the flux tube between the planet and Io. I tuned a portable radio around HF until I hit on some good noise bursts. It really didn't sound all that special, but I could tell it wasn't terrestrial in origin. Other people who haven't listened to hours of noise on HF..... not so much. They were largely underwhelmed.

So there's this old pop/new wave song. Describes a friend of the singer's who has a short wave radio and can tune in anything on it. He can tune in countries. He can tune in wars. He can tune in ships and planes. One day, he turns up the volume on just noise, and says he's just heard Jupiter. The last line of the song, however, goes, "But I still say it sounds like the noise that you get, when the radio isn't tuned in right."

The people at the picnic were working musicians. No one ever said anything, but this has to be about me. I'm in a song.

_________________
"Words are the new bullets, satellites the new artillery"
--"Winning CNN Wars," Army War College

"One bomb was shown on TV, and the American people bought that war. War is show business."
--"Wag the Dog"

Yeah, I wrote a story about a future time when a military experiment had gone awry and put the ability to hear and see RF into the human genome as a very rare double recessive. The protagonist had his issues with ostracism from society and persecution as a freak. It was an allegory on the first Iraq war, and a very gloomy one, at least until someone slipped the guy acid so he'd lose control and die of brain failure from broadcast station overload, but he learned mental discipline and became very subversive as a result.

The story got submitted around and also it went to outline stage for movie script pitches. No interest anywhere. Before its time.

_________________
"Words are the new bullets, satellites the new artillery"
--"Winning CNN Wars," Army War College

"One bomb was shown on TV, and the American people bought that war. War is show business."
--"Wag the Dog"

Sounds pretty intense.

First thought --> can the DNA angle make this a viable script in the gaming world?

Oh, I'd visualized some of the POVs after cultural overload threatened and everything started looking like Second Life on The Brown Acid. You would not have wanted to see this movie stoned.

_________________
"Words are the new bullets, satellites the new artillery"
--"Winning CNN Wars," Army War College

"One bomb was shown on TV, and the American people bought that war. War is show business."
--"Wag the Dog"

We're in orbit!

Speaking of Jovian aurora, check this Hubble photo:

_________________
"Words are the new bullets, satellites the new artillery"
--"Winning CNN Wars," Army War College

"One bomb was shown on TV, and the American people bought that war. War is show business."
--"Wag the Dog"

Juno has returned home...well, to one of her homes, anyway.



Juno, Queen of the Gods
Goddess of Marriage and Childbirth



Jupiter's Auroras Create a Rhapsody in Blue Before Juno's July 4 Arrival (Time-Lapse Video)

http://www.space.com/33311-jupiter-auro ... video.html

After a period of few to no sunspots, there are currently three really really nice active regions. They've been putting out C class flares of little consequence, and there's a slightly higher probability of bigger stuff.

For a time two of the regions looked like eyes, staring right at the Earth. Drawing faces on the sun, indeed. Now one of these has gotten more complex with that paired magnetic structure that says "I can flare real good." (And we say, bet you can't.)

_________________
"Words are the new bullets, satellites the new artillery"
--"Winning CNN Wars," Army War College

"One bomb was shown on TV, and the American people bought that war. War is show business."
--"Wag the Dog"

"And I don't want a never ending life
I just want to be alive while I'm here."


lyrics --> http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/strumbellas/spirits.html

_________________
"Words are the new bullets, satellites the new artillery"
--"Winning CNN Wars," Army War College

"One bomb was shown on TV, and the American people bought that war. War is show business."
--"Wag the Dog"

Forget solar flares (for now), it's all about coronal holes. They are many, and persistent. They won't cause a Carrington Event, but they can make for great aurora (again) and shitty radio propagation conditions (again). Both seem to characterize 2016. Just think, if we were a primitive tribe (that just happened to have invented HF radio), we'd look at all the other shit going on and think the gods were angry.

_________________
"Words are the new bullets, satellites the new artillery"
--"Winning CNN Wars," Army War College

"One bomb was shown on TV, and the American people bought that war. War is show business."
--"Wag the Dog"

Climate change is likely going to kill millions, displace billions and all within 75 years.

I wish I could live long enough to see it.

_________________
"Small brown babies, clutched in their beaks"