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Ming mans death ray
One thing we may never forget is the first episode of the Flash Gordon serial. Ming the Merciless aims a death ray of some sort at Earth.
It is this event that leads Flash to venture into space to counter Ming's death ray. And, pulling from a trove of newsreel footage, the serial directors showed the x-ray results: tidal waves in Samoa, earthquake in China, catastrophe in general.
When we feel bad, and feel the world seems in a tangle too, how often we feel it is Ming and his cosmic death ray disrupting our natural order. When president's totter and the car won't start, we wonder if Ming is at work. Clinton's and Wall Street's (not to mention the Mets') August 1998 troubles seemed to a part of a confluence. And we note that on August 27, 1998, according to Stanford and other researchers, witnessed a cosmic event in which the Earth's magnetic field was extravaganly disrupted by a distant 3-megaton "magnestar."
Last week the confluence came again.
So what do we know about these things (sometimes) called magnestars and (more widely known as) geomagnetic storms? Geomagnetic storms are major disturbances of the magnetosphere that occur when the interplanetary magnetic field turns southward and remains southward for an prolonged period of time. The drop in the surface magnetic field strength during the main phase of a geomagnetic storm is typically preceded by a brief rise in the field strength (see the entry for Dst index). Geomagnetic storms are classified as recurrent and non-recurrent. Non-recurrent geomagnetic storms, on the other hand, occur most frequently near solar maximum.
I asked Ham Radio Man Dan Romanchik about the storms. Should we track them carefully? He said he followed it in a roundabout way on a mailing list that broadcasts a propagation report every week. It's put out by the American Radio Relay League. http://www.arrl.org
Dan is a man of many blogs and sites. There is:
Dan of ARROW Comm. Assn. (www.w8pgw.org)
Ham radio Dan bookseller (www.QTB.Com/hamradio/)
Ham radio Dan blog at www.blurty.com/~kb6nu .
Dan writes: "On another amateur radio mailing list that I'm on (Elecraft: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft), one of the other listees claims to be a retired space scientist and he puts out his own little space weather forecast twice a week and tries to correlate that forecast to shortwave radio propagation.
"It's really amazing how this stuff affects shortwave radio conditions. The rule of thumb I use is 'solar flares = bad.'"
Fact is we spent Friday at the auto repair - the alternator fritzed out.
RELATED
Space Weather -NOAA.gov
Solar storm brewing - Oct 23, 2003 space.com
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