The interactions between those solar particles and the upper atmosphere typically results in an auroral display, but the potential to severely change Earth’s surface magnetic field, and induce currents, cannot be ignored. When energetic charged particles from the sun interact with the Earth, the Earth’s magnetic field tends to funnel those particles down around Earth’s poles. If an event similar to 1859’s Carrington event occurred here on Earth today, it would result in a multitrillion dollar disaster. This turned out to be the first-ever observation of what we now know as a solar flare: an example of space weather. And troublingly, telegraph systems began sparking and igniting fires, even though they were disconnected entirely. Newspapers could be read by the light of the aurora. Miners awoke in the middle of the night, thinking it was dawn. Aurorae were visible worldwide, including at the equator. Approximately 18 hours later, the largest geomagnetic storm in recorded history occurred on Earth. All of a sudden, a “white light flare” was observed, with unprecedented brightness and lasting about five minutes. That changed dramatically in 1859, when solar astronomer Richard Carrington was tracking a particularly large, irregular sunspot. Or you could view the sun’s corona during the most visually appealing spectacle that nature has to offer: a total solar eclipse. You could view the sun’s disk directly, either by putting a solar filter over your telescope’s eyepiece or by creating a projected image of the sun, both of which will reveal any sunspots. You could pass that light through a prism, breaking it up into its component wavelengths: from ultraviolet through the various colors of the visible light spectrum all the way into the infrared. If you wanted to study the sun, you simply looked at the light from it. From the 1600s through the mid-1800s, solar astronomy was a very simple science.
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