Terryl
Specialist Contributor
- Joined
- Apr 14, 2011
- Messages
- 3,280
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- Age
- 82
- My Satellite Setup
-
OpenBox X5 on a 1 meter motorized dish.
And now a 10 foot "C" band dish.
Custom built PC
- My Location
- Deep in the Boonies in the central Sierra Nevada mountains of California.
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)
GOES Proton Flux | NOAA / NWS Space Weather Prediction Center
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)
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)
GOES Proton Flux | NOAA / NWS Space Weather Prediction Center
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)
