Texts From Last Millennium
February 25, 2016 12:33 PM Subscribe
Newspaper Snippets from August 28 - September 2, 1859 This is a series of excerpts from newspapers describing the largest solar storm on record in essentially real time for the era. The Aurora Borealis it caused was visible in the Carribean, and it shorted out telegraph lines across Europe.
Previously
Previously
I'll never forget the March 1989 aurora. It was bright enough that I was looking up at the street lamps (in mid-town Toronto) when I noticed weird colours in the clouds; then realized the sky was clear. I was with a date and we ran to a park to see all these morphing reds, greens and purples with dim white spires reaching up towards some point not quite directly above. Ten minutes later, the sky was mostly dark again.
posted by bonobothegreat at 1:05 PM on February 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by bonobothegreat at 1:05 PM on February 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
Am I the only one who thought this was going to be about a Twitter account that posted tweets as though they were SMS messages from the 19th century?
posted by univac at 1:46 PM on February 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by univac at 1:46 PM on February 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
Michele in California: "This is a series of excerpts from newspapers describing the largest solar storm on record in essentially real time for the era."
It's fitting that the web design is also approximately from that era, then.
I kid, this is cool.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 2:21 PM on February 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
It's fitting that the web design is also approximately from that era, then.
I kid, this is cool.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 2:21 PM on February 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
The web design is pretty bad. But I found it less offensive than most of the articles that came up when I searched for "Carrington Event." So many of them were predicting that the next solar storm this size will be our Apocalypse.
I tend to view such predictions as hyperbole (See "Y2K shall be the end of the world!" and see "the Kuwaiti oil fires shall burn for years and be a global environmental disaster!"). So, I was thrilled to find this site filled with firsthand reports of what actually went down, rather than dramatic predictions of sci-fi-esque apocalyptic fantasies trying to scare the begesuz out of people.
posted by Michele in California at 2:27 PM on February 25, 2016
I tend to view such predictions as hyperbole (See "Y2K shall be the end of the world!" and see "the Kuwaiti oil fires shall burn for years and be a global environmental disaster!"). So, I was thrilled to find this site filled with firsthand reports of what actually went down, rather than dramatic predictions of sci-fi-esque apocalyptic fantasies trying to scare the begesuz out of people.
posted by Michele in California at 2:27 PM on February 25, 2016
The auroral light sometimes is composed of threads like the silken warp of a web; these sometimes become broken, and fall to the earth…
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you "Science Reporting."
posted by The Bellman at 3:36 PM on February 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you "Science Reporting."
posted by The Bellman at 3:36 PM on February 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
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posted by Thorzdad at 12:45 PM on February 25, 2016 [1 favorite]