Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Solar Shockwaves


Heliotown has an incredible binaural recording of the radio emissions from a solar flare:

There was a C8.8 solar X-ray flare today that caused moderate to strong Type II bursting from 1740 to 1749 UT. This flare event is still being analyzed as I write. Below is an audio file recorded in stereo of the strongest part of this solar shockwave event that occurred between 1744 UT and 1748 UT. Recorded at 18.7 MHz one one channel and 22.2 MHz on the other channel. This was a particulary fast Type II radio burst event recorded traveling from the Sun at 2230 kilometres per second! It sounds like a freight train rolling through.
Check out their other audio links, too, which include the burning of Zozobra and the insertion of a leap second in the WWV UTC broadcasts. (Site recordist Thomas Ashcraft and I were obviously separated at birth.)

2 comments:

Aloysius said...

Dude. If there's one thing I like better than nudibranchs, it's planets and stars and other big round and not-so-round things in the sky. (I used to have dreams that I was flying in 'scapes that looked like Yes album covers.)

Beautiful photo. This almost makes up for One Bank.

Phila said...

Okay... that burning of Zozabra thing is really weird, but fascinating. Especially since the effigy burning part was apparently conceived in more "modern" times, but reaches back to the more ancient traditions.

Yeah, it's pretty much a product of the 1920s NM artist community.

I went every year, for a while. I'm not a big fan of crowds, usually, but I always found Zozobra exhilarating. I actually have a recording I made of it myself, somewhere...