SOLAR EVENTS LOGGER
Do you know of a solar event? List it here and we'll study it.
I'll start with the date of June 6th, 2011.
Hers an article about SDO showing the coronal mass ejection...
10 Amazing Discoveries About the Sun From NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory
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LARGE SOLAR EVENT OF SEPTEMBER 29, 1989: TEN YEARS AFTER
L. I. MIROSHNICHENKO1, C. A. DE KONING2 and R. PEREZ-ENRIQUEZ3
1Instituto de Geofisica UNAM, Mexico, D.F., 04510, Mexico, Permanent address: IZMIRAN,
Troitsk, Moscow Region, 142092, Russia
2Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, 19716, USA
3Instituto de Geofisica UNAM, Mexico, D.F., 04510, Mexico, UNICIT, Campus Juriqilla UNAM,
Ap. Postal 15, Juriqilla, Queretaro, Mexico
(Received 19 July 1998; accepted in revised form 15 July 1999)
Abstract. Out of the 56 Ground Level Enhancements (GLEs) of solar cosmic rays (SCRs) observed
since 1942 until the present, 15 events were recorded in the 22nd cycle of solar activity (1986–
1996). Solar proton events (SPEs) in that cycle displayed some peculiarities, which may need an
interpretation on a new concept base. The event of September 29, 1989 is of special interest. Since
the well-known event of February 23, 1956, it proved to be the most intense in the relativistic range
of proton energies. This GLE affords a unique opportunity to study the propagation of SCRs over a
wide range of rigidity.
In spite of its occurrence behind the western solar limb, the originating major flare could be
observed over a wide range of the wavelengths and particle energy spectra – from gamma rays to
decametric radio waves, from >2 MeV electrons to multi-GeV protons; there were also measurements of the energy spectra and charge states of solar heavy nuclei. The flare was followed by some
energetic solar phenomena (large magnetic loops, coronal eruptions and mass ejections, shocks, etc.).
Due to the very hard rigidity spectrum, this was the first GLE recorded by underground muon detectors. The event also has a number of other unusual features, for example, an extended component of
gamma-ray emission and the change in direction of the probable particle source during the event’s
initial stage. In addition, the intensity-time profile of the GLE is notable for its non-classic shape,
showing a two-peak structure. The latter implies the possibility of a two-component (or two-source)
ejection of accelerated particles from the Sun.
The available observational data for the event is described in detail, the main focus of this paper
is concentrated on different attempts to interpret the data within the framework of traditional and
non-traditional concepts: shock and/or post-eruption acceleration, two-component (dual) ejection,
two-source model of particle acceleration in large (extended) coronal structures, etc. None of the
models put forward for explaining this event is exhaustive. The rigidity spectrum of ejected protons
is estimated and the problem of the maximum rigidity, Rm, of the accelerated particles is discussed. In
the relativistic range, this event proved to be by 1–2 orders less intense than the event of February 23,
1956. It is also shown that the event of September 29, 1989 could not have been recorded with the
present-day neutrino detectors.
Well, the Carrington Event did occur within that time. So thanks for posting, although it's a little vague.
Would somebody like to put up some images of the sunspots and CMEs observed prior to the Carrington Event?
Warm protonic regards,
Dan, a.k.a. smAshomAsh
1859’s “Great Auroral Storm”—the week the Sun touched the earth
Accounts of the largest electromagnetic storm ever recorded.
Noon approached on September 1, 1859, and British astronomer Richard Christopher Carrington was busy with his favorite pastime: tracking sunspots, those huge regions of the star darkened by shifts in its magnetic field. He projected the Sun's image from his viewing device onto a plate of glass stained a "pale straw colour," which gave him a picture of the fiery globe one inch shy of a foot in diameter.
The morning's work went as normal. Carrington patiently counted and charted spots, time-lining changes in their positions with a chronometer. Then he saw something unusual.
"Two patches of intensely bright and white light broke out," he later wrote. Carrington puzzled over the flashes. "My first impression was that by some chance a ray of light had penetrated a hole in the screen attached to the object-glass," he explained, given that "the brilliancy was fully equal to that of direct sun-light."
The astronomer checked his gear. He moved the apparatus around a bit. To his surprise, the intense white patches stayed put. Realizing that he was an "unprepared witness of a very different affair," Carrington ran out of his studios to find a second observer. But when he brought this person back, he was "mortified to find" that the bright sections were "already much changed and enfeebled."
"Very shortly afterwards the last trace was gone," Carrington wrote. He kept watch on the region for another hour, but saw nothing more. Meanwhile, the explosive energy that he had seen rushed towards him and everyone else on earth.
Better than batteries
It hit quickly. Twelve hours after Carrington's discovery and a continent away, "We were high up on the Rocky Mountains sleeping in the open air," wrote a correspondent to the Rocky Mountain News. "A little after midnight we were awakened by the auroral light, so bright that one could easily read common print." As the sky brightened further, some of the party began making breakfast on the mistaken assumption that dawn had arrived.
Across the United States and Europe, telegraph operators struggled to keep service going as the electromagnetic gusts enveloped the globe. In 1859, the US telegraph system was about 20 years old, and Cyrus Field had just built his transatlantic cable from Newfoundland to Ireland, which would not succeed in transmitting messages until after the American Civil War.
"Never in my experience of fifteen years in working telegraph lines have I witnessed anything like the extraordinary effect of the Aurora Borealis between Quebec and Father Point last night," wrote one telegraph manager to the Rochester Union & Advertiser on August 30:
The line was in most perfect order, and well skilled operators worked incessantly from 8 o'clock last evening till one this morning to get over in an intelligible form four hundred words of the report per steamer Indian for the Associated Press, and at the latter hour so completely were the wires under the influence of the Aurora Borealis that it was found utterly impossible to communicate between the telegraph stations, and the line had to be closed.
But if the following newspaper transcript of a telegraph operator exchange between Portland and Boston is to be believed, some plucky telegraphers improvised, letting the storm do the work that their disrupted batteries couldn't:
Boston operator, (to Portland operator) - "Please cut off your battery entirely from the line for fifteen minutes."
Portland operator - "Will do so. It is now disconnected."
Boston - "Mine is disconnected, and we are working with the auroral current. How do you receive my writing?"
Portland - "Better than with our batteries on. Current comes and goes gradually."
Boston - "My current is very strong at times, and we can work better without the batteries, as the Aurora seems to neutralize and augment our batteries alternately, making current too strong at times for our relay magnets.
Suppose we work without batteries while we are affected by this trouble."
Portland - "Very well. Shall I go ahead with business?"
Boston - "Yes. Go ahead."
Telegraphers around the US reported similar experiences. "The wire was then worked for about two hours without the usual batteries on the auroral current, working better than with the batteries connected," said the Washington Daily National Intelligencer. "Who now will dispute the theory that the Aurora Borealis is caused by electricity?" asked the Washington Evening Star.
Working with solar-powered telegraph lines sometimes proved to be risky, however. As the sky filled with light, East Coast telegrapher Frederic Royce struggled to get his messages to Richmond, Virginia, his hand resting on the iron plate of his gear. Distracted by the displays, he also leaned on the system's "sounder," which indicated by audio whether the circuit was connected or not. At the same time, his forehead touched its ground wire.
"Immediately, I received a very severe electric shock, which stunned me for an instant," Royce wrote to The New York Times. "An old man who was sitting facing me, and but a few feet distant, said that he saw a spark of fire jump from my forehead."
The night of Carrington's discovery, the electrical hurricane that had swept the globe peaked. The Great Auroral Storm had actually begun several days earlier with a similar incident on August 28, but it was Carrington and another astronomer, Richard Hodgson, who identified one of the solar flares that enveloped the earth in a week-long magnetic maelstrom. Because of their work, the episode was dubbed the "Carrington Event," and it consumed the world's attention for the week.
A livid red flame
In New York City, San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago, thousands of sky gazers wandered about the midnight streets, astounded at what they could see. "Crowds of people gathered at the street corners, admiring and commenting upon the singular spectacle," observed the New Orleans Daily Picayune. When the September 1 aurora "was at its greatest brilliancy, the northern heavens were perfectly illuminated," wrote a reporter for The New York Times. He continued:
At that time almost the whole southern heavens were in a livid red flame, brightest still in the southeast and southwest. Streamers of yellow and orange shot up and met and crossed each other, like the bayonets upon a stack of guns, in the open space between the constellations Aries, Taurus and the Head of Medusa—about 15 degrees south of the zenith. In this manner—alternating great pillars, rolling cumuli shooting streamers, curdled and wisped and fleecy waves—rapidly changing its hue from red to orange, orange to yellow, and yellow to white, and back in the same order to brilliant red, the magnificent auroral glory continued its grand and inexplicable movements until the light of morning overpowered to radiance and it was lost in the beams of the rising sun.
Popular descriptions of the spectacle appeared everywhere. In 2006, a team of space scientists assembled a collection of eyewitness newspaper accounts of the storm. What stands out in these reports is the astonishment, awe, and even pleasure that the world experienced for a week—followed by a sobering realization of how close our planet is to its indispensable star.
In Cincinnati, the aurora came "like that preceding the rising moon, while in the west a delicate crimson seemed to be thrown upwards, as if from the sun, long since gone down," wrote a journalist for the Cincinnati Daily Commercial.
Later, these strange fires overran the entire heavens—now separating into streamers, gathered at the zenith, and forming a glorious canopy—then spreading evenly like a vapor, shedding on all things a soft radiance; again, across the sky waves of light would flit, like the almost undistinguishable ripple produced by the faintest breeze upon the quiet surface of an inland lake; a pale green would now cover half the firmament from the east, while rich crimson met it from the west—then the ruddy light would concentrate itself at the zenith, while beneath it fell in folds of beauty the mild purple and green. To the east and to the west lay huge fields of luminous clouds, tinted with a bright rosy flush, wholly unlike that produced by the rising sun and if possible even more beautiful.
And so it went around the United States and the world. The sky appeared "blood red," noted the New York Herald. The storm produced "a beautiful halo, and at another period it had the effect of falling from the apex in showers of nebulous matter like star-dust," reported the The Hobart Town Mercury from Tasmania.
One swallow
What did people in 1859 think of this remarkable solar spectacle? Scientists had been watching sunspots and other Sun phenomena by telescope since the days of Galileo in the early 17th century. Through the second half of the nineteenth century they began to zero in on the link between solar events and geomagnetic storms. As space science historian R. A. Howard notes, these discussions continued through the 1940s, and led to the identification of Coronal Mass Ejections—huge bursts of mass and magnetic field energy from the Sun, provoked by the breaking and reforming of solar magnetic field lines. Orbiting space instruments photographed CMEs in the 1970s—documenting the expulsion of matter from our solar system's energy source.
In the months shortly after the incident, newspapers and scientific journals found other possible causes. Scientific American postulated falling debris from active volcanoes, the San Francisco Herald theorized about "nebulous matter" from "planetary spaces," and Harper's Weekly settled on reflections from distant icebergs.
As for Carrington, he modestly warned against "hastily connecting" what he had seen to the dramatic events of the week. "One swallow does not make a summer," he observed in the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Needless to say, this kind of scientific caution did not comfort lay observers, many of whom took the spectacle to be "a sign of some great disaster or important event, citing numerous instances when such warnings have been given," according to the New Orleans Daily Picayune. Optimists, the poet William Ross Wallace among them, interpreted the event as a message from God:
. . . ‘mid terror, we still Can a symbol behold Of the Heavenly Love In the flame o’er us rolled; Evermore, evermore Though in mantles of fire, There are pitying smiles From our God and our Sire - O Lights of the North! As in eons ago, Not in vain from your home do ye over us glow!
Dollars and cents
The Carrington Event is always remembered following a major solar flare, such as the remarkable eruption on the Sun's surface caught by NASA space cameras on April 16. And in the aftermath of such incidents, we do what we do best these days: we worry—about our machines and our money and our future. There's a one-in-eight chance of a Carrington-like magnetic storm over the next eighteen years, warns one study. Another notes that the consequent disruption to the global infrastructure could cost trillions of dollars.
Putting religious and metaphysical questions aside, how much did all this disruption cost the US telegraph system? The compilers of these eyewitness accounts note a subsequent assessment by Scientific American that the average telegraph operator was worth about $75 a day to his company. Assuming that half the extant telegraph stations (1,500) were disrupted in some way, the researchers guesstimate a cost of $56,000 to the States, and perhaps $270,000 to the whole world. Combining general telegraph business revenue loss with operator labor revenue loss, they expand the global sum to something in the neighborhood of $300,000.
But that doesn't include ripple costs—to stock markets, to businesses that used the telegraph, and to families. "Other than the occasional anecdote reported in the newspapers, we have no contemporary means to truly gauge the economic impact of these two auroral events," they conclude.
No doubt a Carrington Event today would cost lots more, given that we've become much more dependent on electrical and electromagnetic devices since 1859. The good news is that our Sun surface-watching technology is now sophisticated enough to get the word out about an impending magneto-disruption a lot faster than lone Carrington did. That gives network and grid managers time to prepare.
But when the next Great Auroral Storm descends on us and power and wireless systems go down, here's hoping that after we've given up on attempting to tweet or Instagram the moment, we'll do what our ancestors did: just look up in the sky, marvel at the sights, and try to have a good time. For centuries, most of us have worked with the comfortable notion that "space" is Up There and we are Down Here. In the late summer of 1859, the human race discovered that it's all connected.
Further reading
James L. Green, Scott Boardsen, Sten Odenwald, John Humble, Katherine A. Pazamickas, "Eyewitness reports of the great auroral storm of 1859," Advances in Space Research, Volume 28, Issue 2, 2006; full article on NASA archive site here.
source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/05/1859s-great-auroral-stormthe-week-the-sun-touched-the-earth/
Not all reporters welcomed these images with pleasure. "Half-past eleven. The appearance now is positively awful," wrote a horrified correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle on September 5. "The red glare is over houses, streets, and fields, and the most dreadful of conflagrations could not cast a deeper hue abroad."
Others took a pragmatic approach to the moment.
"Singular as it may appear, a gentleman actually killed three birds with a gun yesterday morning about one o'clock [in the morning]," disclosed the New Orleans Times Picayune, "a circumstance which perhaps never had its like before. The birds were killed while the beautiful aurora borealis was at its height, and being a very early species—larks—were, no doubt, deceived by the bright appearance of everything, and came forth innocently, supposing it was day."
Here's one. We caught it right after at happened!
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Just so you know.
Our YouTube channel http://youtube.com/smashomash is the ultimate solar events logger.
If you want all the data on the Sun and Sun/ Earth system in one concise place- it's there. Our Daily Space Weather videos stretch back three years and have not only the graphics of all the solar activity or lack thereof- all the data of the Sun Earth system is also there. Want to know what was happening a year ago today in space? We've got that.
94A SDO, 33ms animation
x-class solar flare
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33ms, SDO 94Å
X-class solar flare
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