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Biggest solar flare since 2017 erupts from sun and Earth is in the firing line
- chuckledog 2y ago[flagged]
- pfdietz 2y agoTrack the impacts on https://www.spaceweather.com/ https://www.spaceweather.com/
- dylan604 2y agoHoly cow that's an insane website design. So, where exactly do I see the tracking? Is it below the grift of a 3D printed moon? Is it near the ads for casinos. Or maybe the mood rings? This isn't a bitch about ads. It's I honestly cannot easily find the actual information the site is supposedly hosting.
- BenjiWiebe 2y agoThere's an information/status bar on the left. There's a header on top with important info/ current events. Then it's kind of in blogpost format. And if you ever want to know what info was there last year, there's an archive viewer on the top right, that actually shows the page just like it was, at any date!
- mystified5016 2y agoWoah, they must be doing something weird to get past ad blockers. This is an outrageous monstrosity of a website
- dylan604 2y agoWeird as in self-hosting? This is what ads should be like instead of 3rd party auction data harvesting non-sense. It's just some people have no concept of couth, or less is more, or self control. There's no stopping bad taste.
- damiankennedy 2y agoThey're not using an automated ad service of any kind they have manually put these ads in the source code of their web page. We all see the same ads. I prefer it, these ads mean something to the people that run the site, they put some effort into putting them there and presumably purchasing the products benefits the organisation in some way. They also have a no AI disclaimer at the top.
- dylan604 2y ago> these ads mean something to the people that run the site I wouldn't go that far. They mean something as in somebody was willing to spend money, so this is what they get in return. Just look at the randomness of the types of ads. I doubt there was any "qualifying" of the ads other than did the check clear.
- grayfaced 2y agoI spent way too long trying to find basic info before I gave up on that site. The two questions I was hoping to see: 1. When will it be the strongest 2. What latitudes should expect to see auroras. The first question is answered by: https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/3-day-forecast https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/3-day-forecast (Strongest at Fri 2100-0000 UTC)
- gonzo41 2y agoYou've just been sheltered by bootstrap for the last 10 years. All science on the web is 'fun' like this.
- pfdietz 2y agoI love the design! It has heart.
- drmpeg 2y agoLooks good to me even on Netscape 4.7. https://www.w6rz.net/netscape.png https://www.w6rz.net/netscape.png
- animex 2y agoInsane? It's pretty typical for an early 2000s era site.
- hattmall 2y agoThat site design is awesome. That level of information density is exactly what makes a good site. The information is right in the front, ads are off to the side. It's basically like a newspaper. Which is great for information.
- pfdietz 2y agoAnd it loads really fast. Slow-ass loading (and things jumping around as the ads load) are what really drives me to ad blockers.
- partomniscient 2y agoMy 'local' page is [1] which is fairly simple but likely has only the information you're interested in, nothing else and none of that side-scrolling bullshit you need to do to see the forecasts on the https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ page. [1] https://www.sws.bom.gov.au/ https://www.sws.bom.gov.au/
- AlienRobot 2y agoThanks, I'll add it to my bookmarks.
- Animats 2y agoNo warnings at NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center.[1] No warnings on PJM grid dashboard. Probably not going to be a problem. [1] https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/
- cryptoegorophy 2y agoAny new auroras?
- dgacmu 2y agoPerhaps you checked a few minutes too soon? > SWPC Forecasters have issued G3 (Strong) Geomagnetic Storm Watches for 04-06 October due to a pair of coronal mass ejections that are anticipated to arrive over the course of the next three UTC days. Stay tuned for updates as we monitor this activity!
- chgs 2y agoIs a UTC day a different length to a common solar day? At this level of pre soon leap seconds and even sidereal day difference makes no difference
- bamboozled 2y agoPrediction: Absolutely nothing significant will happen here.
- herpderperator 2y agoI hope you have ECC memory! :-)
- vardump 2y agoH've never hAd any issues wiphout ECC.
- lemme_tell_ya 2y agoThat you know about... ;-)
- tzs 2y agoFor a couple years I had a process running on a PC without ECC that simply filled a large buffer with a bit pattern that was 50% ones and 50% zeros, and then periodically scanned the buffer for changes. It never found a changed bit. I used a 2008 Mac Pro at work and a 2009 Mac Pro at home for several years. They had ECC memory. I would periodically check the RAM status and I never saw anything that said an error had been corrected. For that test with the big buffer I don't remember how big a buffer I used, but I remember my calculations based on the error rate data I could find said that with the size buffer I was using I should have seen a few errors per year. But I think all the error rate data I found was from servers with a lot of RAM and located in data centers. I wonder if that environment is more prone to RAM errors than the environment of the typical home computer?
- adrian_b 2y agoA buffer is much too small to catch any errors, unless you dedicate more than half of your installed memory to it. Typical memory rates for a computer with only 8 to 32 GB of DRAM might be of at most a few errors per year when new. For some aged memory modules, after several years of use, the error rate can increase a lot and it can become noticeable. For myself this has been the main benefit of ECC, the ability to detect early the memory modules that must be replaced to avoid data corruption. Besides the errors from cosmic radiation, which depend mainly on the altitude of the location, there are also errors caused by electrical noise from the environment. The latter may be more frequent in data centers and in industrial computers.
- hn72774 2y agoThe aurora forecast is looking good https://www.gi.alaska.edu/monitors/aurora-forecast https://www.gi.alaska.edu/monitors/aurora-forecast
- grugagag 2y agoDoes this have any effect on the human body? Is this exposure measurably damaging for people?
- Jtsummers 2y agoAs long as you're not in space you should be fine. If you are on the ISS, then you have some other experts you can consult, us randos on HN won't be able to help you much.
- prox 2y agoI would not be surprised if some space folk frequent this site.
- JackMorgan 2y agoI work on space weather stuff... but only on it's impact to satellite orbits, not impact to humans, sorry!
- beepboopboop 2y agoThis guy edge-cases
- elashri 2y agoYes but you have to be an astronout in the outer space without enough added protection for the increase of radiation. Or maybe some increased exposure for high altitude flights near the poles. Other than that earth's atmosphere would make it that not enough exposure will reach the surface of the earth. Well things would be different for indirect harm because of satellite and signal failures. They could even cause disruption for power grid. But I think most of the protection for these systems in place take solar flares into account. So probably the effects will be minimal.
- arrowsmith 2y agoIf we ever colonise Mars, will the colonies be more or less vulnerable to solar flares than Earth? Not that I know anything this subject, but my understanding is that Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth, and no magnetosphere. Would that make solar flares more dangerous? Or would the colonists be protected by whatever habitat is protecting them from everything else on Mars? What about electronic equipment that sits outside the human-habitable zones? Could it be fried by a solar flare that would be relatively harmless on Earth?
- djbusby 2y agoRecent/relevant XKCD about these kinds of things https://xkcd.com/2979/ https://xkcd.com/2979/
- elihu 2y ago> The solar flare emanated from the sunspot group AR3842, which has made headlines before. On Oct. 1, the same sunspot region fired off a powerful X7.1 solar flare and unleashed a coronal mass ejection (CME) — a plume of plasma and magnetic field — which is currently barreling toward Earth. That incoming CME is expected to hit Earth between Oct. 3 and Oct. 5, possibly triggering widespread auroras. I actually just saw an aurora for the first time in my life a few months ago in Oregon, where they're hardly ever visible. It was quite a sight. Maybe I'll get to see them again.