On Sunday, July 20, 2014 9:07:00 AM UTC-7, Hägar wrote:
Halfway through its Solar Maximus cycle, the Sun goes as

blank as treBert's brain ... not a smidgen of black in sight,

except for that small brown stain in his undies:



http://www.latimes.com/science/scien...718-story.html


Just the calm before the storm, I would say.

"The largest recorded geomagnetic perturbation, resulting presumably from a CME, coincided with the first-observed solar flare on 1 September 1859, and is now referred to as the Carrington Event, or the solar storm of 1859. The flare and the associated sunspots were visible to the naked eye (both as the flare itself appearing on a projection of the sun on a screen and as an aggregate brightening of the solar disc), and the flare was independently observed by English astronomers R. C. Carrington and R. Hodgson. The geomagnetic storm was observed with the recording magnetograph at Kew Gardens. The same instrument recorded a crochet, an instantaneous perturbation of Earth's ionosphere by ionizing soft X-rays. This could not easily be understood at the time because it predated the discovery of X-rays by Röntgen and the recognition of the ionosphere by Kennelly and Heaviside. The storm took down parts of the recently created US telegraph network, starting fires and shocking some telegraph operators."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronal_mass_ejection

If such a Carrington event were to happen today, it could take down the entire US power grid!

Double-A