It has been a strange day. Fires have evacuated the Mt. Wilson Observatory in California, and SOHO images have not been updating all day. Power is down at the mountain and the webcam has gone offline. See status here. Mt. Wilson Observatory is now in the hands of nature and CDF. Let’s hope CDF wins.
It is about 4 hours now past ooGMT Sept1, 2009 I’ve checked all my sources. Besides the fate of Mt. Wilson, we’ve all been waiting to find out two things:
1- Will we have a spotless calendar month for the sun in August 2009?
2- Do I still have my solar mojo?
The Catania sunspot drawing shows nothing for the 31st.
Other solar observatories, Uccle in Beligium, Locarno in Germany, both show nothing on August 31st sketches.
This animation from SIDC of the past 30+ days shows nothing for August but DOES show group 1025 popping up on 9/1/2009
http://sidc.oma.be/html/cmap_animator.html
I also checked SIDC’s sunspot report data for August, nothing.
It looks like the spot today, group 1025, squeaked by and was not observed until after August 31st game clock ran out at 00 GMT 91/2009
Then I checked NOAA SWPC….
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/latest/DSD.txt
Message to NOAA Space Weather: Out damned spot!
And wouldn’t you know it, they have something whereas last year it was the other way around…NOAA had nothing, SIDC (via Catania) did…so where does that leave us?
Leif said last year that SIDC had the last word…so unless they change their report, we may indeed have a spotless calendar month.
We’ll have to see what happens when their report comes out tomorrow. They issue a new report on the first of each month.
http://sidc.oma.be/products/ri_hemispheric/
Watch that space.
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Leif Svalgaard (02:37:13) :
Geoff Sharp (23:11:10) :
We are discussing the latitude of 1025 at solarcycle24.com, it probably needs to be confirmed whether that is the case yet
—————————-
1025 N17E32 169 0010 Bxo 03 02 Beta
SIDC has August 2009 as 0.0
Thanks, great number for Aug, no weeding to do this month, and the SIDC have the whole month to think about 1025. But what is your opinion of the latitude of 1025, is it closer to the equator than would be considered normal for this stage in the cycle?
When I clicked to enlarge the image I thought I saw a cluster of spots on the West side just above the equator – turns out it was last nights supper.
History does repeat itself. And I’m afraid it doesn’t seem to make NASA the least obliging. NOAA, early in the morning of the 1st of September, announces a sun spot. What gets me is how dismissive they are of the events taking place. Go ahead. Blow it off like its no big deal. Oh, by the way, we had a sunspot interrupt a string of 51 days. No biggie. Its insulting. I looked at the photos regarding the sunspot. Small. Pretty. Brief. Just like their announcement. When the true story, begging to get out, is in opposition to NASA’s stance on solar behavior. Dr. Hathaway has been preaching increased solar activity ever since he took his current position with NASA. His dismissiveness irritates me. Hey ! David ! Why not talk about predicting a longer than usual solar minimum. How about explain why every single prediction, you’ve ever givin, doesn’t even resemble the evidence that’s been presented. Its intolerable. How about something more actual, e.g. “At the suns current pace, a safe estimate of the number of spotless days, should rival thoses of the Maunder Minimum,” (latest, but not likely, press release). It seems our govt. wishes to engage in dialogue only when it benefits ‘their’ agenda. Real science, stands as an orphan before the magistrate, awaiting sentence. -David Alan-
You’ve got to look real hard to see that.
I notice Leif’s daily TSI graph hasn’t been updated recently, although the other graphs have been.
Geoff Sharp (23:11:10) :
As I posted yesterday on sc24, it was a difficult projection. It’s no fun standing out in the hot sun waiting for the seeing to co-operate. Somebody managed to count it for NOAA.
Still waiting for any word about the latitude being that far progressed.
Why does Catania bother posting images magnified beyond it’s resolution?
Bin it down, bud, or get a bigger hammer.
John A (01:57:48) :
Maybe an alternate feed from JPL, which was offline but seems to have survived the fire.
The GONG network is also suffering from a lot of outages.
It’s probably pulling apart and will go poof today. I saw no signs of growth yesterday.
Brief question: is it known whether sunspots maintain their integrity – visible or on the magnetogram, from one solar revolution to another, and hence whether they spiral in toward lower latitudes? And is it known at what latitude the Carrington event in 1859 occurred?
rbateman (03:54:03) :
You did a great job catching those specks. It will be interesting to see if 1025 is recognized by SIDC, they have time to think now.
Still waiting to see if there will be any SOHO images, the website has been down although some of it is fine. They are showing next Continuum contact at 13:50 UTC but we have seen the smaller gif images from MIDI floating around from 18:09 yesterday, lets hope we get a full resolution snap for around the same time. My gut feel is 1025 wont make the grade on our count.
Tower cam at Mt. Wilson continues to operate this morning – pretty eerie – looks like a Martian landscape: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~obs/towercam.htm
A long solar minimum is still a long minimum even when you get the odd spec/short period mini-spot/whatever. I feel quite confident in saying that the planet Earth does not care about our calendar months, it responds to total input or lack of.
SC 24 beats SC 15
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/solarcycle252.jpg
Unbelievable… so close yet so far.
Looks like something happened to the Mt Hood camera. Flames visible in last image, but the time stamp is over 30 minutes ago.
NASA’s dilemma:
Staying with a number confirms Watt’s infallibility.
Removing the number lends credence to the sun playing a roll in climate.
A small new sunspot (1025) has formed in the northern hemisphere and belongs to Cycle 24 because of the magnetic polarity. This ends the spotless streak. Image is below.
http://solarcycle24.com/
Sorry for the repost. I skimmed the last few comments but apparently missed the one with the same information.
Anthony tried to create a dark spot, and instead took out the whole Sun.
There are some things Man is not meant to meddle with.
Even if at Spaceweather they count imaginary spots to make this non cycle go away, we are still in a major solar minimum that is not about to go away.
“specks, united, will never be defeated!”= 0+0 =12
Another California fire as viewed from space:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features.cfm?feature=2298
SIDC is showing a spotless month. But realy, does it make any difference if there is a tiny spec that lasts fro 8h (or less)?
PS OT why is there a tiny smily in the bottom left corner of the page.
Keith Minto (22:08:14) :
Spaceweather seemed very pleased yesterday about the emergence of the ’speck’ and said it was 15 deg. north of the Equator.
http://www.spaceweather.com/swpod2009/31aug09/Pete-Lawrence2.jpg?PHPSESSID=ra8vjvl4u0porp32sd8nmvc384&PHPSESSID=1menfqr2jrno2u9cmijlm5q3a2
……..though now it probably history.
As I look at this picture, it appears to have “sunlight” hitting it from the right, with a “shaded” region to the left. Now, how can a location ON the sun have a sunlit and a shaded region. Would somebody who understands this stuff please take another look?
Bill P,
Great view from space. Thanks.
From that shot you can see that both SOHO at Mt. Wilson and the
Big Bear lake Solar Observatory are disabled by this one fire. You
cannot even see Big Bear Lake.
In addition to Mt. Wilson, the Cogswell Reservoir weather station,
my introduction to weather station mismanagement, is also threatened
by this fire.
Ash on my car this morning from 40+ miles away. Biiiiig fire.
Why do they make a sketch on paper everyday? Im not green or anything, but that seems like an awful waste of paper considering a computer database could handle such things just as easy if not easier.