It's up.....

Well it's awake, the Sun has finally shown some signs of activity, it has been very very quiet over the last few years, very little to no Sun spot activity over the past 5 years to speak of, then today POP a solar flare has been detected by the GOES 13 satellite, (see link below) not a big one but a flare just the same.

In the link below you will see the activity, now why this news is this important to any satellite site?

Well a big enough solar flare can knock out almost all satellites in orbit, if you look at the graph in the link you will see a dotted line if the green plot goes above that line up two lines above it we could be in trouble. (I would have made the bad one the red plot)

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http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/goes-proton-flux

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In the past we have been very lucky, the last big one just missed us back in July of 2012, but back in September of 1859 we were not so lucky, back then we didn't have anything electronic to worry about, all that was around were telegraph stations, but the flare was so large that most telegraph stations were knocked out for a time, some operators even saw sparks jumping off the equipment.

Had that big a flare happened today you would not be reading about it on your computer, laptop, Ipad, HDTV set or cell phone as it would all be a pile of junk, (so would everything else with an IC chip in it) and all forms of communication would be down, and so would the world wide power grid.

One of the first web sites I look at in the morning is the GOES 13 plot, this will tell me if I need to get the lead underwear out. (not to worried about it now, too old for any young kids to be running around)

Every single day we wander outside without a clue what's in store for us....

I wander around day and night.

I seem to recall that McMurdo station in Antarctica used a satellite that was damaged by solar activity and then given to NSF for their use. They moved it to over the Pacific and into an eccentric orbit so that it was more visible that far south. The solar activity took out most of its transponders and about half of its solar panels so it was OK for NSF use but was going to be destroyed if they wanted to leave it in the orbital slot it had had. McMurdo use the bird for internet back around 1998 or so and had a really big dish (13 meters) that tracked the bird as it drifted N and S--the dome over the dish flexed in the wind that they call "Herbies".