Wednesday, December 08, 2010

Solar Alchemy: How to make a mystery Solar Cycle into taxpayer money


Spaceweather.com is what the Weather Channel is to weather. Couple that with the majority of news being NASA regurgitation, from an agency where job security is determined by grant writing and trips to Congress looking for grants.

Spaceweather.com hyper ventilates over nothing to make you read it, if you're ill informed:

The sun is in the midst of an extremely active period of its 11-year solar weather cycle after a long lull in activity.

This latest solar filament follows on the heels of a similar prominent sun eruption last month. That earlier solar filament was spotted on Nov. 16 and stretched across just over 372,800 miles (600,000 km), making it a shorter than the new filament spotted today.

Last month ! At the height of Cycle 23 (we're now in 24) those words would be "every day" if not "several hours ago." The distances they speak of might seem large, but we're talking infinity, here. Yawn.

The facts remain the same:


:Product: Geophysical Alert Message wwv.txt
:Issued: 2010 Dec 08 0305 UTC
# Prepared by the US Dept. of Commerce, NOAA, Space Weather Prediction Center
#
# Geophysical Alert Message
#
Solar-terrestrial indices for 07 December follow.
Solar flux 87 and mid-latitude A-index 3.
The mid-latitude K-index at 0300 UTC on 08 December was 1 (9 nT).

No space weather storms were observed for the past 24 hours.

No space weather storms are expected for the next 24 hours.

In the immortal words of Yukon Cornelius: "Nothing !"