AmateurRadio.com

Atlas 210X

After living here in the new house since January, I haven’t had a lot of chances to use the radios, even though I now have a room for my hobby (shared, of course with KD2CHE’s sewing).  The shack has been piled with things to sort through, requiring some digging and re-arranging to get to the Atlas 210X.  A few days ago, I finally went through the pile and did some major organizing.  I now have a nice work surface, and all of the radios set up and working (including a recent flea-market find, a snazzy FRG-7).  Tonight after tuning around on 20 meters I answered a couple of calls.  The second call was from 9K2UU in Kuwait.  This contact is now my second-best distance since I got my license (about 6800 miles), and the best from home (the no 1 was Namibia from my 10 meter mobile here at the beach).  Barrak gave me a 5-7, and he got a 5-9 from me.  All of this with an old Atlas 210X, and a 35 foot end-fed sloper into a 9:1 UnUn.  I’m happy with that.

While many are talking about how Solar Cycle 24 is the weakest since the Maunder Minimum (the period starting in about 1645 and continuing to about 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time — see this Wiki entry), there are moments when activity on the Sun strongly increases, providing brief moments of excitement.

Here is a case in point, witnessed by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO; see SDO Mission) on June 7, 2011, when the Sun unleashed a magnitude M2 (a medium-sized) solar flare with a spectacular coronal mass ejection (CME). The large cloud of particles mushroomed up and fell back down looking as if it covered an area almost half the solar surface.

SDO observed the flare’s peak at 1:41 AM ET. SDO recorded these images in extreme ultraviolet light that show a very large eruption of cool gas. It is somewhat unique because at many places in the eruption there seems to be even cooler material — at temperatures less than 80,000 K.

This video uses the full-resolution 4096 x 4096 pixel images at a one minute time cadence to provide the highest quality, finest detail version possible.  The color is artificial, as the actual images are capturing Extreme Ultraviolet light.

It is interesting to compare the event in different wavelengths because they each see different temperatures of plasma.

Credit: NASA SDO / Goddard Space Flight Center

Video: http://g.nw7us.us/1aOjmgA – Massive Solar Eruption Close-up (2011-06-07 – NASA SDO)

Visit: SunSpotWatch.com