Just another Reality-based bubble in the foam of the multiverse.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Spring storm



A blast on the far side of the sun, the first since February.

SOHO observed a solar storm blast off to the left of the Sun (Mar. 17-19, 2009) over a two-day period. It appears to have originated on the far side of the Sun. In general, these coronal mass ejection (CME) explosions are fairly common, but with the Sun bumping along the bottom of its 11-year activity cycle, we have seen only a few storms over the past month. In this coronagraph still image, the Sun and some of its atmosphere are covered by an occulting disk so that we can see faint features in the surrounding corona. We superimposed an extreme UV Sun image also from SOHO taken at the nearly the same time to show its size.

1 comment:

Wiglaf said...

Hmmmmmmmmmm

I agree with your earlier post that primitivism isn't the answer, but I also sympathize with many primitivists who correctly realize that we've made ourselves absurdly dependent on our electricity and chemistry.