Last night, NASA saw the year's biggest solar flare

[techbeck]

If you noticed a little extra radio interference last night, it wasn't your imagination. At 3:16 AM, NASA saw the biggest solar flare of the year, an M6.5-level coronal mass ejection that was powerful enough to cause a brief radio blackout. That's not enough to disturb much outside the highest levels of the atmosphere, but it still looked pretty spectacular through the right telescope.

http://www.theverge....est-solar-flare

[Detection]

I'd forgotten until I just read this, but in the early hours of this morning (UK) I was messing with my phone and noticed a G in the place H usually is, meaning HSDPA was down (o2 UK)

Was this 3:16AM UK time ?

[techbeck]

Was this 3:16AM UK time ?

I would assume since NASA is reporting this, it is US time.

[Crisp]

Beautiful photo.

[Detection]

I would assume since NASA is reporting this, it is US time.

Yea 0716 GMT, maybe there was some smaller flares a few hours earlier that knocked it off, or a coincidence

[Growled Member]

Beautiful pictures. It must have been over by the time I got up.

[ShareShiz]

Looks so crazy.

[cooky560 Veteran]

Awesome photo, we live in a pretty (if not dangerous) universe.

[beanboy89]

http://www.accuweather.com/en/features/trend/dazzling_northern_lights_antic_1/10107004

This solar flare is expected to cause strong auroras, especially in areas not typically used to seeing them (looks like as far south as around 39? or 40? north). I'm especially excited because I'm in an apparently good viewing area.

Map courtesy accuweather.com.

[Growled Member]

I've been wondering if this is the reason so many of my friends and family are coming to me complaining about how their computers are acting crazy and how slow the Internet has been for them.

[Gerowen]

These solar flares have been crazy. I've been getting tons of skip on my CB radios after dark when it normally gets quieter. It seems to have slacked off the past day or two, but last week was crazy. Normally after the sun goes down, a lot of the background noise and "skip" goes away, but I had my house radio turned on the other day at like 11 at night and heard people hundreds of miles away fading in and out.

[morebaker]

no problem with wifi or 3g on my phone

westcoast maybe later

[Dane]

http://www.accuweath...ntic_1/10107004

This solar flare is expected to cause strong auroras, especially in areas not typically used to seeing them (looks like as far south as around 39? or 40? north). I'm especially excited because I'm in an apparently good viewing area.

Map courtesy accuweather.com.

Were you able to check it out? I sat on the Lancaster/ Lebanon County Line for over three hours and nothing.

[beanboy89]

I was in Grantville for the evening at Penn National and I saw nothing aside from the mortar testing/training going on at Ft Indinatown. Really wanted to see the aurora.

[remixedcat]

Wow blech virginia being a "good" labelled area for once??? o_O

I know that my fridge has gone wonky and is making wierd noises after this solar flare hit? ooooh noooes! Wifi is fine though.

[Marshall Veteran]

Moved Here

[DocM]

The M6.5 ranking doesn't mean much without knowledge of the scaling system, so here it is.

The most commonly used scale measures the X-ray flux (wavelengths 0.1 to 0.8 nanometer) produced by the flare.

For A, B, C, and M class flares the value of n is between 1.0 and 9.9, but for the X class the value of n can be as large as required.

Examples:

M4.2 = 4.2 x 10^-5 W/m^2

X16 =16 x 10-4 W/m^2 = 1.6 x 10^-3 W/m^2