With all the incessant heat this summer, the one bright spot is the Sun.
My interest in astronomy has led me to articles about our most important star. Frankly, I had no idea that it could carry on so. Looks like a source of global warming to me, but I'm no scientist.
NASA has lots of websites, so I don't have to invest in a solar telescope or a solar filter for the 'scope I have. That's great, because as a shade tree person, I can't see how I could manage it.
So, there are all these cool satellites orbiting the Sun, sending back fabulous pictures and videos.
There are even online tutorials for us Sun dummies to learn a thing or two. Everything that I wanted to know but was afraid to ask about Coronal Mass Ejections has been carefully explained, with pictures.
The news is that the Sun is not only in an extremely active year for sunspots, zero days without one this year, but is "ramping up" for lots more next year.
Stuck inside in the endless heat advisory days, I've become addicted to spaceweather.com, checking every few hours to see the drama unfolding. At night, excited by the solar activity, I go outside and look for auroras excited by the solar activity.
I believe that all those cameras orbiting the Sun are contributing to the sunspots, solar flares and CME's. It's just like when young movie stars get surrounded with more press coverage than is good for them. They can't handle all that public scrutiny and flip out.
Next, we'll have media polls tabulating which sunspot was the biggest disappointment, or the best fireworks display. I don't see it going so far as a trend toward young mothers naming their babies AR-1520, but you never know.
