From Astronomy Daily:
Hold onto your Ass-teroids folks.
While NASA was trying to get our attention by telling us a Solar Tsunami is nothing to worry about and would only be responsible for bringing the Aurora Borealis further south for viewing, the very fact that the term tsunami was being used should have tipped us off that this was no ordinary magnetic field headed our way. We saw the effects of the tsunami that hit Indonesia and it was not all pink and green ribbons of light. It was death and destruction. If you’re going to use a word like tsunami, you better be ready to back it up with facts, which NASA unfortunately could not.
While NASA was trying to get our attention by telling us a Solar Tsunami is nothing to worry about and would only be responsible for bringing the Aurora Borealis further south for viewing, the very fact that the term tsunami was being used should have tipped us off that this was no ordinary magnetic field headed our way. We saw the effects of the tsunami that hit Indonesia and it was not all pink and green ribbons of light. It was death and destruction. If you’re going to use a word like tsunami, you better be ready to back it up with facts, which NASA unfortunately could not.
A tip off that something bigger than just a pretty light show in the night sky is that NASA is putting off repairs of the space station until Friday. Hmmm, wonder why? Is that a wait-and-see attitude? Why spend the money on the space station if there was a chance of it being obliterated Wednesday morning? Hmmm? Just a hunch.
All NASA would say is that a larger than normal solar flare was spotted on the surface of the Sun and it was headed toward Earth and was expected to reach us by early in the morning on August 4th. If you are one of those people who wait until the Vernal Equinox in spring to stand an egg on its head, then you were probably that much more interested in this event.
Just what the flare would produce, remained a mystery. The most anyone could say is that it would produce green and pink ribbons across the sky and be visible to anyone living in the northernmost part of the country as long as they aren’t in a highly-lit area. However, if you’ve been fortunate enough to see NASA’s photographs of the flare, what it looked like was a giant fiery door that was headed our way, and our imagination tells us that anything or anyone that may have passed through it, if they did not get burned beyond recognition, would have witnessed one of the most amazing things in their lifetime, that and your cell phones and iPods and other electronic devices were expected to be on the blink temporarily as the doorway reached our atmosphere.
So, whether you were bold enough to stand outdoors in the wee hours of the morning of August 4th hoping to catch a glimpse of this solar tsunami, or you decided to cower under your bed and hope to hell our imaginations were wrong, either way, it came and went, and there’s really nothing anyone can do about it now. But we are still scratching our heads and saying “what if?”
Next week, we’ll discuss that errant asteroid that’s been headed our way for decades.
