Massive solar Flare

News reporters love a good scare story.
These are the same people that told everyone that planes MIGHT fall from the sky when the calendar clicked over to 2000.
My Garmin can only see 11 sats in my backyard and many at full strength.
It reminds me of an episode of Doomsday Preppers with a prepper scared that solar flares in the (then upcoming) solar maxima of 2012-13 were going to send society back to the 1800s.
GPS kept working right through that too.
 
http://www.ips.gov.au Aussie space weather service reckons theres a solar flare thingy coming our way & low frequency radio waves could be affected by fadeouts, this flare is traveling at 340km/sec. to 390km/sec., not to shabby! AND just to show how insignificant we really are, the space service showed a picture of the flare coming off the sun with Earth superimposed at the tip of the flare, it would have taken another 9 Earths, end to end to touch the sun :shock:
 
Well riding my BMW bike home after work my Garmin never did find any satellites on the 10 mile ride home, usually picks them all up in a minute or two.
 
Meta4 said:
News reporters love a good scare story.
These are the same people that told everyone that planes MIGHT fall from the sky when the calendar clicked over to 2000.
My Garmin can only see 11 sats in my backyard and many at full strength.
It reminds me of an episode of Doomsday Preppers with a prepper scared that solar flares in the (then upcoming) solar maxima of 2012-13 were going to send society back to the 1800s.
GPS kept working right through that too.


It is something to keep an eye on:

"Earth's atmosphere usually protects us humans, but you might want to keep a flashlight handy. Solar storms can knock out power, interfere with GPS and radio communications -- including those on commercial airliners -- and damage satellites."

Full story:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/11/tech/inno ... ?hpt=hp_t2
 
K-Index just jumped to a 6 in the past hour or so... that's enough to warrant paying close attention to your sat count this afternoon :ugeek:

Or for the extra careful... just skip flying...

High K-Index like this can cause inacurate GPS function even if the sats are showing as acquired in your telemetry...

And yes we all know that you can fly right through situations like these with no problems at all... but they don't issue these warnings for no reason... so just because somebody says "i do it all the time and nothing ever happened to me" ... doesn't make it a wise thing to do :ugeek:
 
DBS said:
but they don't issue these warnings for no reason

But when 'they" are a bunch of science illiterate journalists who love nothing more than peddling scary tales of impending doom, you have to wonder if this is being over-hyped.

With all the "the sky is falling" warnings, has anyone heard of any real effects on anything other than auroras?

I've been watching my Garmin for a couple of days and seen no effect on number of sats, signal strength or accuracy and
I've flown normally.
 
But I'm sure you'll be the first one crying about your phantom having a flyaway. Yes I'm sure most of us will never have a problem , but I'd hate to be that one guy. :D
 
Meta4 said:
DBS said:
With all the "the sky is falling" warnings, has anyone heard of any real effects on anything other than auroras?

This was actually mentioned at my office at today's weekly meeting because we use a lot of GPS data in our field projects. It was discussed that the accuracy of the GPS could be compromised during this period of time (the peak occurring tomorrow) and that the last time there was such a strong sun flare, a portion of Quebec experienced a power outage for several hours. That from our in-house meteorologist. Maybe Quebec's power grid is a weaker one with a greater sensitivity to these things.

I was looking forward to getting into the air this weekend, but I'd rather not take the risk of losing my new bird. I'd rather be a little cautious. That K-Index is starting to light up. http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/alerts/k-index.html
 
Check out in the vine app 'observing space'
They stream NASA sun. There are lots more if this happening than you think.
 
Wow.. Watching that animation of the flares hitting the earth, I'm surprised we're all not dead. Pretty cool stuff.
 
DBS said:
Today... K-index bumped up to a 3 a couple hours ago but is back down at 2 now... they didn't give a time from what i was reading they just said "should arrive Friday" :ugeek:

Gonna slam together a J... walk outside and aim it at the sun... If it doesn't fire up... I'll worry about something else and flick a Bic...


-slinger
 

Members online

No members online now.

Forum statistics

Threads
143,066
Messages
1,467,358
Members
104,936
Latest member
hirehackers