A New Internet Meme: Possible "once in a lifetime" solar storm possible in 2013 —

The source of the meme in question is this "scientific" sounding sentence: "Every 22 years the Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks while the number of sun spots – or flares – hits a maximum level every 11 years. "

Telegraph.co.uk:

National power grids could overheat and air travel severely disrupted while electronic items, navigation devices and major satellites could stop working after the Sun reaches its maximum power in a few years.

Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes “from a deep slumber” sometime around 2013, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

[. . .]

A “space weather” conference in Washington DC last week, attended by Nasa scientists, policy-makers, researchers and government officials, was told of similar warnings.

While scientists have previously told of the dangers of the storm, Dr Fisher’s comments are the most comprehensive warnings from Nasa to date.

Dr Fisher, 69, said the storm, which will cause the Sun to reach temperatures of more than 10,000 F (5500C), occurred only a few times over a person’s life.

Every 22 years the Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks while the number of sun spots – or flares – hits a maximum level every 11 years.

They don't mention here that both these numbers are very rough averages. WIthout knowing that, this article doesn't make any sense at all, since an 11 year cycle would either coincide with a 22 year cycle every time, or would always miss it...

Dr Fisher, a Nasa scientist for 20 years, said these two events would combine in 2013 to produce huge levels of radiation.

That link about Dr. Fisher (from NASA) actually quotes him as saying is this:

"The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity. At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms. The intersection of these two issues is what we're getting together to discuss."

Looks like someone at the Telegraph was speed reading...

So I googled the sentence "Every 22 years the Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks while the number of sun spots – or flares – hits a maximum level every 11 years. "

It does not exist on the NASA site.

It did, however, get 12,500 hits, mostly from sites that publish "scientific news" by and for people who have very little idea what they're talking about. I didn't find any of them older than the Telegraph article, but lots of them are from the same day.

Astronomical Observation

This is more of a curiosity, really. I happened to be playing with a Skydome, which is a remarkable piece of online programming (I imagine it's flash) that enables you to view the position of any planet (and the brightest stars) at any time of any day you wish.

I was thinking of the time when I became first aware of the planets. It was summer, and Jupiter and Saturn were near a conjuction in the south, and Venus was in the west, just after sundown. But I didn't remember what year that was—late 50s or possibly even 1960. So I dialed in the time (dusk) and date (August) and turned on the wayback machine, clicking through the years until I saw Jupiter nearing the sun and Venus appear in the west. Turned out to be my birthday in 1960.

dusk, September 26, 1960

Not that I'm astrologically minded, but I thought it would be fun to see what exactly was happening planet-wise when I was born. So I dialed up that date, and Mercury, Venus, Saturn and Neptune were in a big blob right near the sun. Why is this fascinating? Don't know. Just is.

Later in the day, the day I was born.

Moon and Venus - February 27, 2009, 1:30pm PST

For once, Venus in the daytime is actually brighter than the moon! Go and check it out for yourself!

Right this minute they're both pretty much right overhead. They'll be a couple of hours behind the sun today, whenever you look. If you look. (Behind the sun in this case means lagging a couple of hours behind it, meaning to the east of it.)

Huge Newfound Part of Milky Way Rotates Backward

Does this make any sense to you?

Maybe it's the way three dimensional space is represented in two dimensions. Think about the center of gravity that the cosmic objects are orbiting. It looks like this would only work as the diagram shows it if the stars and star clusters were attached to the blue sphere, rotating like a hollow glass marble. Sort of Aristotelian...
Space.com:

Huge Newfound Part of Milky Way Rotates Backward By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer posted: 12 December 2007 01:00 pm ET

Our Milky Way Galaxy has two distinct parts in its outer reaches that rotate in opposite directions, astronomers announced today.

The galaxy has a bulbous core where stars are tightly packed and orbiting rather furiously around the central black hole. Then there's the big flat disk with its spiral arms, also orbiting the galactic center somewhat in the manner of a hurricane's spiral bands. We live on one of those arms. Around it all is a halo of stars that don't all behave in such an orderly fashion. That much researchers knew.

Now they find the halo has two parts.

"By examining the motions and chemical makeup of the stars, we can see that the inner and outer halos are quite different beasts and they probably formed in different ways at different times," said Daniela Carollo, a researcher at Italy's Torino Observatory and the Australian National University.

The finding, detailed in the Dec. 12 issue of the journal Nature, is based on 20,000 stars observed as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

The main galactic disk, home to our sun, rotates at an average speed of 500,000 mph. Surrounding the disk is what's now called the inner halo. It orbits in the same direction at about 50,000 mph. The outer halo, a sparsely populated region, spins in the opposite direction at roughly 100,000 mph.

There are chemical differences between the two parts, too. Stars in the inner halo have three times as many heavy atoms, including iron and calcium. These heavy elements were produced by massive stars that exploded fantastically and begat subsequent generations of stars.

"The halo is clearly divisible into two, broadly overlapping components," said study team member Timothy C. Beers of Michigan State University. "The discovery gives us a much clearer picture of the formation of the first objects in our galaxy and in the entire universe."

The study adds to other evidence showing the galaxy was not built in a cosmic day. Rather, it assembled over time, gobbling smaller galaxies in one of nature's greatest construction projects.

The inner halo probably formed first, from collisions between smaller galaxies that had been captured by the Milky Way's gravitation. The outer halo formed later, the thinking goes, as small galaxies (orbiting opposite our own) were lured in and torn apart.

"We still have a lot to understand," said Masashi Chiba of Japan's Tohoku University.

Saturn Moon and Venus — 10:22pm PDT

This (extremely faint) little dot way to the left is Saturn. The bright dot to the right is Venus. This picture is tipped about 30 degrees counterclockwise so I could get things lined up.

In the sky, Saturn looked quite bright, but to get it into the camera at a similar brightness overexposed the moon and Venus an insane amount.

Moon and Venus, May 2007

Observing Venus in the daytime. One of my oldest interests is astronomy. I was sufficiently fascinated by it as a tiny kid to ask for a telescope for Christmas. My mom made a deal with me. She said I could get a small telescope that year, and if I really used it perhaps the next year the big one in the catalog might appear. The first one I got was a small and black and focused by sliding the tube that holds the eyepiece in and out of the main tube. It was probably collapsed down to no more than a foot or so. Its tripod worked, but was quite small. I used to set it on top of walls and tables and other things to see anything up high. It soon became evident that I would like a bigger, "real" telescope, so I think the next Christmas I awoke to find a fine, "real" telecope beside the tree. It had a quite nice equitorial mount and a 60mm objective lense, with a selection of three eyepieces and even a sun filter. It was the best Montgomery Wards had to offer in those days. I could barely pick it up and carry it around the yard. It was considerably bigger than I was. The mount for the tube was just about the same height I was, which would have made me about a yard tall. I was soon dragging my mom and dad out to look at Jupiter and its moons and Saturn and it's rings. But of course you don't need a telescope to observe things. One thing I like to do is find Venus in the daytime. I probably have been doing this since before I got my first telescope, but the first distinct memory of this I have is one day when I was out at Ben Sharpsteen's lake with him and his granddaughter, sometime in the 1970s. I mentioned that Venus was particularly bright that week, and in fact it was visible in the daytime. Gale, the granddaughter, was quite amazed when I pointed it out to her and she saw it plainly, shining there in the daytime. I wonder if she remembers that. My mom got great pleasure out of seeing Venus in the daytime, too. She judged it to be yet another reason to recognize the greatness of God. I've wondered if my fairly lame old 2Mpixel Sony MVC-CD200 with its 3X optical zoom could discern Venus in the daytime. Now, after considerable finagling, I have photographic proof. Yesterday the moon passed right by Venus, so this was a good time to use the moon as a "pointer" to Venus. When I first looked for the planet this morning there were enough thin wispy clouds that I only could catch glimpses of the tiny pinpoint of light. But now Venus is near the zenith, and the clouds seem to have dissolved, so this is probably the best photo my camera is liable to get of Venus in the daytime. The incredibly dim little dot at the end of the arrow at the top of this photo is, indeed, Venus. The crescent moon is at the bottom of the picture. I've tried in vain to get this photo to show up bigger than this, but I can't seem to override the default settings in this blog. I hope you can see the dot that is Venus. If not, you'll just have to trust me. Now I can go on to other things, like trying to finish a painting, and getting ready for my first rehearsal with Larry Potts and his Rivertown Band.