Backyard Astronomy: The Sun can flare up and it has caused damage on Earth | Stay Curious 2023-11-06

The Sun is acting wild in its current Solar Cycle, and it has–and will in the future–create havoc with electronics on Earth.

Part of our museum’s “Stay Curious Backyard Astronomy” series.

An ORIGINAL production of The American Space Museum, Titusville, FL.
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Karan Conklin
HOST & PRODUCER: Mark Marquette
CO-PRODUCER and CAMERA: Marty Winkel
TECHNICAL SUPPORT: Jessica Galloway of Cheep Development https://cheepdev.com/
IT MANAGER & TECHNICAL SUPPORT: Bruce Landon Jacobs
COPYRIGHT: 2023 American Space Museum and U.S. Space Walk of Fame Foundation

Well we’re out in the backyard and look at that Aurora now I’ve got to be way up North to see Aurora like this okay but the moon’s not out and I can see Jupiter Saturn all kinds of wonderful Starry sights up there as we welcome you to

Stay star curious at the American Space Museum here in downtown Titusville I’m Mark Marquette we’re so glad GL that you joined us today as we’re going to talk about how the sun has and will affect communication systems on Earth during these Cycles when the sun gets uh hotter

And more active active meaning throwing off some of its plasma from its nuclear uh Fusion that’s going on there and uh we’re going to talk about Aurora a little bit but there’s a several other phenomenon that I find it interesting one in particularly named Steve that we

Really don’t know what it where it came from and why it happens in our sky so there’s always things to learn when you’re looking up and that’s why we’re glad that you’re with us today also with us today is Marty winkl my co-producer Marty how are you I understand you were

A volunteer at Family Day at Kenny Space Center over the weekend how’d that go that really went well uh I took a Connie mcdels and Bill Whiting and Tammy Miller out there and they just had a great time it’s one of those once in a-lifetime things for them you know

Walking through the VAB going to LCC and you picture taking with Charlie Blackwell Thompson driving out onto the shuttle landing strip seeing where SS 135 wheel stop occurred it was just a great experience wonderful wonderful yes it’s always a I had one time of privilege to be out there like that like

You said it may never happen again uh I was tied up with an event that we were doing with the museums of Bard or or I would have been happily there with y’all but yeah Connie McDaniel one of our Ace volunteers and Bill Whiting also we

Thank you for all that you do Bill uh I bet to had their eyes wide open looking at everything out there Marty I understand you even went out to the a bus tour and they went out to the shuttle landing strip and saw wheel stop

And all that right they went out to uh 39a pad 39a oh really the the the Space X pad uh see the new starship Gantry going up all that stuff that had to be interesting well we’ll try to show some pictures maybe throughout the week of that uh

From those volunteers of ours I know Connie shared some and and we’ll uh uh give you behind the scenes out there I just didn’t have time to Rack them up today because uh uh busy day with all of the things we’ve got going on so let’s

Get our publicity out of the way our galaxy of giving campaign is going to kick off tomorrow but our friend Dave stangy kicked it off already Dave stangy gave us he’s 65 today happy welcome to senior golden life there Dave stangy he’s up in Michigan area

Up there a big uh University of Michigan fan and uh Dave happy birthday to you and he gave us $65 to celebrate his birthday Marty to specifically be used on state curious and we’re going to put your star in the constellation of giving there as he’s given more than that uh

Throughout this four years that we’ve been friends together through State curious there Dave stangy Larry his friend Larry pushkar uh and uh Bill Whiting all are from that state up north from where I grew up of course the great state of Ohio and Marty’s from Long Island so he

Trumps everybody there so uh but our galaxy of giving is no joke we need money to support our our nonprofit and you can get a tax deductible donation by giving to us and we’re going to offer several levels and let you pick some of the the swag that you want to be uh

Given we’ve got astronaut autograph s we’ve got some Skylab SC stuff we’re going to be giving away uh for your uh Financial donations so thank you Dave stangy you mean a lot to us brother and uh he’s been in our Museum several times I didn’t have we’ll show his picture

Here in a day or two and his granddaughter is our youngest fan Marty uh so u space memorabilia show this Saturday I just uh booked at it um uh oh what I got to say not uh uh well we’ve got the patch guy okay Tim gagan’s coming I wasn’t thinking of Tim

I was thinking of uh uh oh who am I thinking of that’s an artist anyway he’ll come to mind but the patch guy is Tim gagan he will be set up there to say some of his patches he literally has a couple dozen of them floating around on

The walls of the International Space Station up there U and we’ve got um uh I want to say Keith Richard but that’s not right it’s uh uh Ken hocott one of the world’s renowned memorabilia experts will be there he in fact is sponsoring uh uh our major expenses

There God bless you there Ken for doing that bid again auctions with Chuck Jeffrey will be there and also uh computers for education we couldn’t do without them they give away computers to kids and and nonprofits like us that they recycle from other uh businesses

Out there so it’s very uh we’re going to have a lot of fun uh we will this is our second annual memorabilia show we hope this grows into astronaut autographs and some things like that down the road but uh to we’re doing what we can uh to

Present this and it’ll be at the Beachside Hotel and Suites there on A1A across from right beside Ron John’s cross from IHOP if you’ve eaten out there and we’ve got two autograph sessions next week November 16th is with Legends Jack LMA and Rusty schwier both trained for Apollo missions schwier on

Apollo 9 uh as the lunar module pilot LMA was a backup and then he was on sky laab for 28 days and then spent I think five or six days in space on sts3 they only one that landed out there at White Sands Columbia’s thirdd Mission

Up there uh so autographs uh you have to be here and be in line to get that autograph we’re not doing anything over uh the lines or Internet not enough time for that $100 for one autograph 160 for the pair yes Marty yeah Carlton Bailey is thinking you mean Ron Woods is that

Correct I do mean Ron Woods thank you I said Keith Richards because I was thinking of a guitarist for the Rolling Stones thank you for my senior moment Carlton Bailey will be there selling some of his real cool stuff and bring a few Godzilla things after all Godzilla’s

Birthday was last uh week November third 70 years old uh but yes Ron Woods talked to Ronnie today in fact and uh he is a white room Tech that suited up the Apollo Astronauts including buzz and Neil and Chris Call’s dad Paul took sketches of that it’s so cool to put

That picture together of these these space of workers that have become artists so uh thank you CB uh we’ve had a great picture that Carlton took from his yard about 30 miles away of a nice streak of the the launch we had the other night uh Friday night in fact so

Nicole stop will be here to sign her Bo her book uh November 18th 1:3 return to Earth and then she’ll be at the rocket Ranch reunion that evening and some of us are going to have breakfast with her courtesy the astronaut Scholarship Foundation uh so uh take part of that there’s the DVD

Searching for Sky lab America’s forgotten Triumph all these astronauts are involved in it and so is our friend Emily Carney and Emily Carney will be in the building space hipsters number one well let’s get three birthdays that happened on November 5th uh on Sunday and uh these uh we like putting them on

Facebook and then acknowledge a belated birthday we have got Bob Sinker was 75 uh Charles Scorch hobo is 62 and Alvin Drew is 61 and let’s look at their smiling faces there now there’s Bob Sinker on his one andone uh launch uh in 1984 I believe uh and uh he was born

November 5th 1948 in melon Township near Pittsburgh Pennsylvania he was a payload specialist for 61c worked for RCA much like our friend Charlie Walker that went up with his uh his company’s uh satellite well this was the final mission before the Challenger disaster so that’s why he

Didn’t fly again was uh didn’t wait in a half two and a half years and then you’re thinking about G I can have a good career here uh with RCA which he did he’s at Penn State and ruter graduate earning two master of science

Degrees in that so uh here he is out the space center not too long ago Bob Sinker we wish you a happy birthday 75 years old then this guy Charles Owen and his nickname is Scorch hobah hobah was born in Bar Harbor Maine in grew up in North Ridgeville

Ohio uh so he’s an Ohio not by proxy a graduate of the US Navy Academy he flew on three shuttle missions he was a pilot on Two and a commander on one 104 and 118 he was pilot and he was a commander on 129 accumulating 36 Days in space and

Uh you would hear Hobo’s voice on the Fateful 107 re-entry Des disaster he was the Capcom uh on talking to the crew waiting to hear them come out of the uh plasma of re-entry and he was saying Houston Columbia Houston UHF com check several times after they realized that they’d

Lost contact with their friends so uh there’s hobah at the mission control I think he uh still involved in uh n in some capacity though not as an astronaut there uh and then also born on November 5th is uh Alvin Drew Benjamin Alvin Drew born November 5th

1962 in Washington DC grew up in Brooklyn uh he was a second lieutenant in the Air Force he’s he uh uh for years he was the last African-American to go to space on STS 133 uh uh that flight with discover Orbiter and um Victor what’s Victor’s last name he was the next

African-American to go up he is a pilot of emis 2 Marty Glover Victor Glover Victor Glover so there’s there was about a 10 11e gap between flying African-Americans in space sadly he performed two space walks and the 200th human to walk in space and there is with

Our good friend Nikki stot up there on STS 133 so uh and he’s retired from NASA so uh Happy Birthday to Alvin Drew Scorch hobah and Bob sener born on November 5th well we occasionally like to remind people of a thing called a newspaper and this is the newspaper article that our

Great volunteer Connie uh Daniel uh gave me the other day uh said that the federal forecasters have announced that geomagnetic disturbances due to increasing solar storms are likely here on Earth and will last through the week this happens all week every week all right particularly during High periods of solar activity that we’re

Experiencing now uh so uh a solar storm is a disturbance in the Sun that can affect the earth and the rest of the solar system all right NASA describes coronal mass ejections CM coronal mass ejections as huge bubbles of coronal plasma threaten uh that uh that threatens intense

Magnetic field lines that are ejected from the sun over the course of several hours all right they twist and and and like an invisible knot but we’re going to talk about just what happens when the uh Earth is hit by a CMA and I’m going to bounce to this right there our

Sunspots on the sun okay and we’ve talked about that on some St star curious programs this is the most important star in our lives it gives us life it’s actually a yellow dwarf star at 800,000 miles across all right if if the uh the Earth is 8,000 miles across

So 800 earths would span from one end to the other over there okay okay it is huge and it’s 93 million miles away and it’s 800 almost a million miles across in Marty why it looks fainer on the edges is because those edges are a quarter of a million mile away from the

Front of it all right so you have a ratio of light intensity decrease by the the sun actually being a 3D object uh and uh that’s called the inverse Square law of light well these big solar these sunspots here here are cooler areas that have invisible loops of magnetic energy

That are tying those groups up okay and these magnetic Loops have a lot of energy to them and sometimes they can like spark like like electricity does and throw stuff out into space these coronal mass ejections now the sun is a nuclear bomb that’s constantly going off

Okay it it is a nuclear reaction that’s controlled by gravity that’s what all stars are and how this all happens is still you know part of physics that that is way above my head and you don’t want to hear all about it but but it’s a good

Career to learn about this the sun is under 24-hour surveillance on Earth by telescopes and also about a dozen spacecraft are constantly looking at it we’ve got ones on the that look at the backside so we can see the solar activity that could flare around let’s

Say the one on the left had a big coronal mass ejection out of its system there that threw spewed stuff into the solar system well it’s pointing away from Earth so it doesn’t hit us takes about three days to go 93 million miles and hit the earth so once we see a

Coronal mass ejection on Monday we can say yeah sometimes wed day Wednesday night Thursday morning is when it’s going to hit and when it hits the Earth this electromag magnetism comes in through the poles that are magnetically charging the Earth in our magnetic field all this invisible energy is really

Amazing to understand the sun’s surface is about 10,000 Dees Fahrenheit but the atmosphere around it is a million degrees all right we don’t know why but all this energy generated at the sun gets hotter as it goes out away from the Sun and and like a nuclear bomb

Well there are several things that happen that uh I’m going to show you this is a river of plasma going through the Earth’s atmosphere and this River of plasma is 13,000 miles an hour this is not Aurora this is something that they call Steve stve and it’s a recent discovery it

Looks like Aurora but it’s not uh this soft purple glow is caused by h rivers of gas flowing through the Earth’s magnetosphere at speeds of uh 13,000 mil hour and uh that’s uh uh about this the speed that an object has to go around the earth which is 177,000 Miles hour

They’re energized by strong geomagnetic storms like the one that happened over the weekend and this was observed over Whitley Bay England and it lasted for an hour says the Observer strong roas danced in the north while Steve flowed through the sky to my South all right uh there are many Unsolved Mysteries about

This phenomenon that’s only been observed for the last few years now why is that nobody really knows is this a phenomenon just ignored that nobody reported or is there something happening in the earth’s electromagnetic field and the energy of the Sun that that’s creating this so uh another great field

To study out there well here’s a special look at the sun through hydrogen Alpha filter the sun is 99% hydrogen so when we look at it and you don’t want to look at it through binoculars or or a telescope or anything unless you know what you’re doing you’re not going to

See the sun like this it’s just going you’re going to see the sun spots like we saw right here this is the photographic sphere the Photosphere this is actually a little bit above the sun it’s so bright that we can’t see the surface until we cut through it with a special hydrogen Alpha

Filter looks like oatmeal boiling a granulation to it all right and the edges those red Flames are actually those dark worm marks filaments we call them on the surface those go over to the edge and that’s what they look like they look red these are the areas that are

Licking off the Sun and any one of these little red Flames around the Sun uh are bigger than the earth all right for sure so you get an idea of the texture and of course astronomers use different filters to see things like the web telescope is using ultraviolet light

Uh an infrared light to see heat registration not the white light that the Hubble telescope is and here is another closeup view an amateur in a backyard Observatory in the observatory they just haul their telescope out the sun’s so bright and close we don’t need big telescopes to

Get fabulous images like this in fact I’m looking around here this might be taken with a telescope just like this big Marty that’s all because the sun’s so close this is a about a two inch uh lens on the end there that’s all you need to deal with the sun and get great

Pictures like that that’s a sun spot a lot of detail around it you see filaments On The Edge on the far left you see a filament that looks like a cloud well that’s really one of these uh flames on the edge there that we call prominences solar prominences so that

The sun is constantly got this edge of fire around it on there and you see the oatmeal texture as this million mile Globe is is is not boiling there’s a nuclear reaction going inside that takes hundreds of years for a photon of light to come out of the center and and reach

The surface it’s quite an amazing uh physics uh our our sun and stars in general the more we know about our sun the more we know about stars in the sky well these Flames coming off if a coronal mass injection would happen like the one that happened Saturday and

Sunday this can be different levels of intensity of course well is space weather is a great website called spaceweather.com and they said the double blow of uh cronal Mass injections hitting Earth over the weekend sparked a strong G3 class geomagnetic storm with a Roar as far south as Colorado and

Texas uh the storm is now subsiding with isolated periods of minor G1 class storming expected through November 6 today well well and then it’ll pack up again this just happened to hit the Earth at the right at right angle say the sun’s rotating 30 30 days around about and so

Uh it one of these could happen and go in the opposite direction from us or come straight at us well we’re going to talk about five events that came straight at us over history uh that have been reported uh you might remember a couple of them but let’s first look at

This steeve there’s a beautiful coming in this is up in Norway in uh I I believe um but you get this in the northern latitudes particularly up where Robert law is in Ireland you’re going to see these coronal mass injections could vary the amount of intensity and this is

Actual discharging of particles off the sun in our atmosphere and the colors that are prominent are green and red and I’ve even heard people say that there’s a roar associated with this sometimes you can book a uh a vacation tour to see these up in Norway and so forth It’s a popular uh

Vacation destination you can even sleep in an igloo that’s all glass I’d love to do that Hazel Banks who’s done this one of our great friends of the museum uh and she uh has has done these these trips up there so uh you can also see him up in Michigan Dave stangy uh

And Larry pushkar when you guys are up there if you ever have a clear night that is uh but uh the northern latitudes of Minnesota and The Dakotas and and uh the state of Washington and all that you and up in Upstate New York the higher the latitude the better chance you but

Chance of seeing them but the real severe ones make it down and occasionally there’s been as far as Florida to see an aurora like this Marty would be almost frightening excuse me this is a wide angle lens with a Time exposure of of maybe a minute so it’s literally like

Finger painting or oozing colors as they streak across a a canvas pinks greens some purples and there there is this Steve structure now those are clouds but this is a flowing gas through the Earth’s magnetus magnetosphere at over 10,000 miles an hour and uh this was described by the witness who took

The picture uh as an intense purple beam we could see it plainly with the naked eye swelling and flickering and Brilliance with delicate structures like those seen within a feather my mate Connor likened it to a Celestial funnel cloud or tornado changing form in real time now to take a Time exposure you

Lose this kind of it said like a feather you can see details involved in there and that looks like the planet Jupiter uh Rising on the horizon there so this is called stve a Little Gnome phenomenon that was just discovered why we haven’t been seeing this for years I don’t know maybe

It’s just something that that that uh the Earth and Sun are in a place where something’s happening that we don’t understand well we do understand that the Sun goes through Cycles uh over a couple hundred years we’ve known this this cycle is the famous 11year solar cycle uh from 1900 to

1906 it Peaks and then it drops down to 1912 to the low and then it comes back back up six years later in in 1918 all right and then drops down in 1924 to almost no sunspots are visible at these lows off my shoulder here is the low that we just experienced around

2010 all right and now we’re up in the middle of this High Point in 2023 well 2010 2023 that repeated again itself on there this is a well-known pattern look at 1960 how the strength of it is based on the uh Sunspot numbers okay so one of the greatest Sunspot

Numbers we’ve ever recorded was in the year 1960 all right and then it tapered down at the next Peak uh uh 11 years later it wasn’t almost half as intense why this happens we don’t know but we do know one thing our star is a variable star it’s not constant things

Are constant constantly changing on it all right and so when you look at global climate change you have to include this solar cycle in it I’d like to know what kind of temperatures were set for highs in 1960 61 for instance there or those those the ones we’re breaking now well

How does all this electromagnetism in the sky affect the planets affect the Earth well it can affect the planets as far away as 4 billion miles away as you see the last two solar Cycles where the Hubble telescope has been orbiting Earth and looking at the farthest planet

Neptune all right a lot of love to Pluto there but you’re you’re the best dwarf planet that ever was but as you can see the bright spots are bright activity in the cloud bands of Neptune and during the low spots you don’t see any and during the high solar

Activity obviously it matches up with big activ activity in the cloud bands where solar radiation even 4 billion miles away increases enough to to light up the clouds on Neptune where those Cloud bands are under under 200 uh they 200 uh degrees below zero so proof that the solar cycle affects Neptune 4

Billion miles away I wanted to say no it’s actually about 2 billion miles away from the earth yeah light light sunlight takes about uh two hours to reach uh nept Neptune at this distance well we’re going to talk about big solar eruptions like this one uh and others that have affected

Electronics on the earth after all if you got electromagnetic radiation Marty it’s the electromagnetic static and other things that are going to be affected all right just like you hear Lightnings crackle and then you might might here static on your radio all right that is the signal of the

Lightning’s energy going through your your receiver on your radio well one of the biggest solar events that has ever recorded in human history was in 19 is 1859 1859 all right so we’re talking right before the Civil War we the main way of communication is Telegraph Morris code on that Telegraph machine

That you see on wild wild west and all the the great westerns out there you know they had Telegraph lines of wire all over uh our country going down to a telegraph machine mostly these followed the railways uh because uh that just made sense well in

1859 four years before the start of the Civil War on September 2nd there was observed a solar flare that caused the storm this geomagnetic storm resulted in widespread auroras Telegraph systems being disrupted and in some cases Catching Fire Catching Fire m wires were melted down as they caught

The energy as the metal caught the energy uh of of this solar flare here on Earth now of course 160 years ago they didn’t have even photography uh barely but they couldn’t have photography take pictures of the Sun to see what was going on and an astronomer named Richard

Carrington made sketches of the sun these days and it showed a massive solar flare like this one but they call that the seahorse solar flare there that shape of it we’re looking right down on something coming out of the the the uh uh the Sun and there’s this black dot is

Actually the Earth that’s what that black black dot right there is is the earth well the Carrington event they call it was the most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history uh it was during solar cycle 10 uh and uh like I said there were uh people that were

Doing Morris code on their little teletype tickers that got their fingers burnt they got so hot uh the the lines were melted down I’ve even understood that some of those instruments may have fused together by the intensity of this hard to believe isn’t it well then another major but more recent history

Let’s look back at 1972 for example on August 4th longdistance phone Communications was knocked out what do you got there Marty oh there’s a Marty showing me New York temperature history uh in 1960 uh was it a peak huh yeah yeah Marty’s showing me thank you Marty there’s a yearly

Chart in 196 uh uh it’s late 50s through 60s how that correlates with the solar the temperature on in New York City the highs matched the solar cycle highs going on there awesome Marty thank you so much for that there uh appreciate that our amazing techn ology now Marty

If we ever hit by a a geomagnetic storm like was hit in 1972 or 1989 in Canada it could melt that machine quite frankly I had in my hand well the solar eruption in 1972 knocked out longdistance phone Communications across some States including Illinois in fact AT&T redesigned its power system for

Transatlantic cables all right and believe it 197 2 50 some years ago we had cables like this thick with wires in them going underneath the Atlantic Ocean all right and uh right down at the bottom of the ocean six miles deep some of it and then it came up on the on the

The coast of uh Europe over there and everybody plugged their phones into those lines over there so they could talk to Europe uh in 72 now this was just the beginning of the burgeoning satellite Communications industry that these noisy Rockets here on this the West Coast launching now you know two

Dozen of them at a time Elon Musk has put up 5,000 communication satellites in the last two and a half years guess what they’re all vulnerable to this electromagnetic energy that comes from coronal mass ejections that uh we’re lucky that we haven’t been hit by a big one with all of our communication

Systems well that’s exactly what happened in 1989 when a powerful solar uh storm provoked a uh major blackout in Canada that left six million people without electricity for nine hours and here is the actual power grid station melted down by the electromagnetic energy from the Sun that entered into it

Through our atmosphere kind of scary isn’t it um it it uh disrupted electric power at the hydro Quebec Quebec Generating Station and even melted some power Transformers in New Jersey shown here this solar FL flare was nowhere near the same scale as the Carrington event which was maybe three times bigger

Than one in the 1859 then just at the turn of the century 23 years ago July 14th 2000 uh a bastile day event in France was disrupted by a major uh solar eruption uh caused some satellites to short circuit and led to some radio black gues it remains one of the most

Highly observed solar storm events and was the most powerful flare since that Canadian flare so that was about 11 years about 20 uh yeah 11 years earlier when are these predictable we really don’t know how to predict them that’s why we got all these satellites

Looking at the sun all the time uh it’s sort of like a predicting when a volcano is going to erupt you might get some indications that there’s a rumbling going on and that’s what they’re trying to figure out what’s going on inside the Sun that makes all this come out like

This well here is another major x-class flare they got all kinds of classes to scare you with them but X means X-rays and this was in 2006 and it disrupted at Ground Communications and global positioning system satellites for about 10 minutes so can you imagine if you’re flying on an

Airplane uh to Europe uh big jumbo jet you know 300 people on it and for 105 minutes the pilot doesn’t have his d g global positioning system working it went offline and they’re trying to figure out what happened and then they got to fly the plane manually and look

At regular compass and like uh air Pilots used to do well this is what can happen uh the sunstorm in in 26 2006 was so powerful that it actually damaged the X-ray imager that took this picture on a uh a global weather satellite yes they use weather satellites to look at the

Sun occasionally too so uh that’s one way they can tell um uh any uh how much uh junk is in our atmosphere by looking at it obliquely and finally just a recent one Marty in 2022 February last February SpaceX launched how many satellites they they launched uh about 50 startling

Satellites during a warmup of the sun caused by geomagnetic activity it just doesn’t disrupt Electronics what it also does is that energy warms up the atmosphere and when things are warmed up they expand so for about a 5-day period these geomagnetic storms warmed up the Earth’s atmosphere enough that it created more

Drag uh up about 50 miles high where these Starling satellites go they’re they’re released in very low orbits from 60 to 120 miles and and then they have uh engines on them that raise them up to 350 mil High all right uh that’s why he can use a smaller satellite booster like

The the Falcon 9 and and get so many of them up there these are the Pez dispensers so to speak they shoot out of there like your candy Pez dispenser that you’re looking at down on Earth well he launched 40 satellites that’s the number 40 on February 2022 worth over 50

Million and then shortly after deployment the atmospheric drag on them as they tried to use their ion thrusters to to move them up wasn’t enough to overcome the atmosphere that had suddenly raised it itself it’s the same principle that Doom Sky lab all right in

19 77 when it came down way too early or 79 I think during a geomagnetic storm atmospheric drag drag absorbs energy from the storms heats up and expands upwards making our atmosphere denser and these at this atmosphere was so dense that these satellites could not raise up to their proper orbit and they

Failed to overcome the increased drag and began to fall back to earth eventually burning up in the atmosphere and Elon mus said Ah that’s another $50 million in satellites 60 million in in launching them you know we’ll just write that off so uh but it does happen and it

Happened a year ago the sun causing the demise of 40 starlink satellites and the astronomy Community cheered as those nasty uh satellites they’re nasty because they leave streaks of light across exposures of images and other things well that’s all for the sun affecting us the way it has thank you uh

Connie McDaniel for suggesting that story with a news item that warned everybody that the sun uh was having coronal mass e ejections it has them about every week uh but they don’t all point to Earth and therefore we’re safe but one time we’re going to hit a biggie

And I predict our cell phones could be wiped out uh we went from the cell towers to the satellites now that’s what’s going on if you’ve noticed less uh cell towers and and cell relay St on the side of hotels and so forth like I sell a lot now Daytona Beach but those

Have disappeared because of the satellite constellations that are being put up although Elon Musk constellations are specific for his own uh system out there well hope you enjoyed looking at our sun do not look at it with telescopes binoculars it’ll burn your eyes out immediately but enjoy it for

What it is our warming lifegiving star what well if you don’t know what this mission is all about shame on you this is our first expedition one was going on November 2000 for 23 years space has been continuously occupied by human beings on our International Space Station all right

We’ve always had Americans up there right now we have two American women no American males that’ll be uh changed in March with the launch of the crew8 uh which has a a Barrett and another ma American male on it but uh think about it for 22 three years if

You’re 23 years old or 20 years old or have somebody grandkids kids that are 20 21 22 23 years old they have never breathed a breath on Earth as someone’s not breathing a breath in outer space orbiting Earth you got Sergey kurov there Bill Shepard was the commander rer

And Yuri Gensco was the Russian up there both Russians very experienced so was Bill Shepard with this was his fourth flight that’s what the space station looked like above their heads there 23 years ago with Zev dearia and uh uh the Earth’s uh U not Harmony um

Zeva uh zarya and uh our our unit there Unity yeah Unity Unity put everything together there and this is what it looks like today of course you can still find the Z the zebda mod the docking module up there at the top uh in what the International Space Station has become a

True Partnership of human beings from I think there’s five different countries up there now uh doing science together getting together eating meals together then going on their basic tasks down the hallway so to speak uh the structure in the center is the backbone there’s nobody in that they’re all below that on

The The Tubes here in the in the bottom that’s the kbo Japanese module with the porch there that they can put things in and out with the robotic arm you see there uh and then uh all the rest of it is infrastructure for the solar panels

And the new solar panels that we have there go out and see the uh International Space Station there’s an app for that about twice a a month in the morning for about a week and then the uh evening Twilight for about a week you can see it Go overhead

It’s quite a sight to see the 70th Expedition is going on H coincidentally for those of us that might be 70 years old and there are the crew mates uh that are up there together seven of them we should act like crew mates on Earth not like passengers they have to act like

Crew Mees because they’re helping each other and quickly we’ll remind REM you all to go out and look at the stars over the next few nights as the Moon is not up uh it’s in the e in the after midnight sky in fact new moon is on the

13th of this month and uh but if you an early morning Riser like I know you are Marty you go out and see the moon uh let’s see the 9th is Wednesday maybe Thursday the you’re going to see the moon near the brightest star in the sky and that star

Is the planet V vus Venus is just brilliant in the morning sky right now uh and uh but then it’s going to be whipping around our evening Sky by the 14th and then you’re going to see the uh uh it come up as a crescent in our sky

And first quarter is November 20th well here’s a star map that you can get for free at Sky maps.com all right and uh the pink the blue is the Milky Way yeah you think about the Milky Way as a summer phenomenon but quite frankly it’s best in October and November uh as we

Get dark with Eastern Standard Time taking over Sun is setting at uh 5:30 at night instead of 6:30 so it’s going to be dark before uh supper and the Milky Way is just gorgeous right now and then it’ll keep moving to the West uh and by about 11:00 be gone completely from our

Skies but uh a lot to see the planets Jupiter let me uh notice that we have Pegasus the horse there in the middle and the passion play of the uh uh uh Passion Play of the hero Perseus saving the maiden uh Andromeda is all told out

There in the sky that that uh you can see there so uh up in the sky right now Larry pusker will be going out and looking at the brightest star you see in the East Larry at about 9:00 and of course the higher it gets uh the more

Apparent it is is the planet Jupiter only Venus the sun and the moon are brighter than Jupiter shown here a professional not a professional amateur astronomer like me and a better telescope than what I own took that with the red spot visible there’s the red spot again in a uh

Another backyard telescope there the red spot is a storm that is like a cyclone that’s been happening and you can see it’s kind of pushing the clouds as it goes through it so it’s very fun to watch and you can actually watch these Cloud bands change uh within the hour as

Jupiter moves quite frequently and uh it goes around in 10 hours incredibly so you’re only going to see the red spot there for about 3 or 4 hours as it moves across the uh cloudband there Doug Forest glad that you’re watching today uh up above uh at night is the a bright

Star looks pretty bright it’s brighter than most stars around it that’s the planet Saturn Doug Gary Gerald may have seen that already he’s up there in Georgia uh Cliff Watson thanks for watching today in Pomona Australia and your financial contributions and support of the American Space Museum we got

Carlton Bailey watching and Mark yusak uh two great friends of of of each other and now me in the museum space nerds watching glad that you’re watching and Marina R is watching in the Ukraine now we’ve got the we got a question for you Marina you see the picture at the top

And you see the moonrise Over the Horizon well if we could put Saturn at the distance that the Moon is 250,000 miles away is that what the Moon is that what Saturn would look like taking up about 17 degrees of our Sky because the Moon is 2,000 miles in diameter and it

Takes up half a degree of our Sky incredibly 180 moons could be stacked end to end from Horizon to directly overhead yeah like that like a there go like that all right well this is fact the moon would be that Saturn would be over 7 Dees across and the the uh uh

Rings over 25 and if we were on Coco Beach it would look like this in the evening Twilight wouldn’t that be a sight to see so uh that is fact that that is Saturn if put at the distance where our Earth is our moon is wouldn’t

That be cool to see so well the only cooler thing to see is space View Park and our shuttle Monument out there picture I took the other day on a beautiful clear day the pylon on the right that you see and the one behind the tree and the other ones in the

Distance those are space workers like Marty Winkle that paid $100 during the construction of this this was dedicated nine years ago this month uh with a whole Entourage of astronauts there quite a a work of art uh that side of the tells the story of where all the uh

Cent were that were involved with the shuttle and then on each panel around the side carved in in Granite are uh different processes of our wonderful shuttle orbiters that are now in captivity in museums and we sure love looking at Atlantis at our Kennedy Space Center so Marty that’s it for today

Thank you for a great uh streamlabs presentation as everybody learned uh probably more than they wanted to about how the Sun affects us here on Earth get ready for that big coronal mass ejection you’ll know it when your cell phone melts in your hand I think it could get

That bad there could be something that intense that could hit us and just melt the uh transistors or whatever chips and whatever we have here that’s doing electronic work for us so anything else Marty all right we have Terry White coming on Wednesday to talk about the

Space shuttle as the uh garage shuttle garage manager so to speak the shuttle garages being the orbital processing facilities and uh tomorrow we’ll try to show you some pictures of the fun that some of our volunteers and Marty had out at Kenny Space Center they had over 5,000 people out there I understand

Marty quite a big turnout uh and it was a a big family day uh a way to get the families and everybody unifying together as the Artemis program uh has NASA going back to the moon so until tomorrow when we talk about some more space news as

Well as some shuttles of the month of November I’m Mark Marquette we can’t wait to see you in our Museum to bridge the space between us thank you Dave stangy I’m putting the money on November 25th game okay on the Buckeyes see you all later