A view of McMath Region 11976 from the Paris Observatory early on 4 August 1972.
I have a vivid memory of seeing -- as a kid -- Aurora from our home near New York City. Eric Carlsen, my childhood friend and colleague from the Waters Edge Rocket Research Society, told me his mom had similar memories. A while back I did some Googling and concluded that it had to have been the monster solar flare of August 1972:
https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/2009/09/carrington-flares-aurora-where-were-you.html
That blog post got about eight comments, mostly from other folks with similar memories -- they apparently were led to my blog by the same kind of memory-based Googling that I had done.
This year, on Christmas Eve, Elisa and I were flying home from the Dominican Republic. I was reading (on my phone) "To Hold Up the Sky," an anthology of Cixin Liu's science fiction short-stories. I'd read his excellent "Three body Problem" in the Dominican Republic back in December 2017. His work is usually "hard" sic-fi, with a strong connection to real physics.
One of the short stories in the anthology is entitled "Full Spectrum Barrage Jamming." Wow, I thought, that one is really promises to be very interesting for a radio amateur. I turned out that it was more interesting than I expected.
I won't spoil the story for you. Suffice it to say that Cixin Liu makes reference to the same August 1972 solar flare that I remember from my childhood, and discusses its effect on radio propagation. It was really kind of eerie to be in that plane, flying over the Bahamas, reading Chi-Fi on my I-phone, and seeing the author reference that memorable event from 1972. TRGHS.
There were plans to turn this story into a movie: https://www.yicaiglobal.com/news/wandering-earth-producer-to-film-another-liu-cixin-novel
Here is an excellent article describing what happened back in 1972: https://room.eu.com/article/lessons-from-the-sun. The August 1972 flare was so strong that it caused U.S. Navy anti-ship mines to explode in Haiphong harbor in Vietnam.
I don't remember that event. I was in eastern NC getting ready to head to college as a freshman and was focused on college and the war in Vietnam.
ReplyDeleteI was at Cornell University in Ithaca NY, just about to start my senior year. It was the first time I'd seen auroras, and it was spectacular! I had no idea til recent reading starting on spaceweather.com put me on the track of similar storms.
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