“Don’t look at the sun!”

Did your mom ever yell at you for looking directly at the sun?  Turns out that long before Galileo figured out how to use a telescope to project sunlight onto paper people were viewing sunspots with their naked eyes.  History records that some observations of sunspots go back before the time of Christ even!

This week I came across some interesting graphs in a book by Edward Tufte.  They showed some recorded history of sunspots showing their intensity and number vary on a roughly 10 year cycle. 

Turns out that tonight and tomorrow we are going to get blasted with a wall of ionized atoms that erupted from the Sun’s surface on Sunday.  Apparently the ten year cycle is starting over and the sun is waking up to become more active for a while!

Here’s a story about the solar storm from Fox News

Solar Tsunami

Click on this cool image of the sun to see a slideshow with more great pics!