Comet Ison Outburst takes it to naked eye visibility.

Comet Ison Comes to Life

Comet ISON Comes to Life

Veteran comet observer John Bortle reports that Comet ISON is undergoing a major outburst. It was six times brighter when he observed it this morning (November 14th) than on the previous morning.

Bortle noted a short, faint tail while viewing the comet through 15×70 binoculars. At least one observer has reported seeing the comet without optical aid.

New Bruce Gary Images

Nov14

Animations and Images (C) Bruce Gary. Much more at http://brucegary.net/ISON/

237 thoughts on “Comet Ison Outburst takes it to naked eye visibility.

  1. Good evening AA; I’m not ashamed to admit I’m behind the 8-ball on all this extraneous data. Math and physics were always above my pay-grade as my strong point is linguistics. I think I understand that magnitude has to do with brightness
    (outbursts, et al) but I find this comet different from your latest pics.

    The quietness of the Sun seems to be the calm before the storm. IYO, can ISON be the precursor to the kill shot? I know we should have some warning from a CME (what is it 24 hours?) My question may be beyond your acumen, but I want to ask:

    What precautions would you take if you had, say 36 hours to prepare for an incoming? I’m not talking about anything other than minimizing the damage.

    Would it help to throw the main breaker to your home? The Carrington event saw telegraph wires catch fire. If I’m connected to the grid, does it exacerbate the damage to wiring, or does it matter whether I’m connected or not?

  2. Ben,

    I came across a link http://www.lorentzcenter.nl/lc/web/2013/562/presentations/Shibata%201.pdf (sorry lots of physics) which suggests that the Sun might be capable of putting out far stronger flares than anything we have seen in modern history. X1000-X-10000 flares might just be possible. Just not very often. The associated CME from one of them would probably be extremely bad if it was to hit. The mechanism proposed (and seen on Sun-like stars) would need massive sunspots so we would have advance warning that a very strong flare was possible.

    Still I’m not seeing anything I can find published suggesting that anyone thinks one is imminent. The sun has been picking up activity in this double peaked solar max but it is still nothing to worry about and remains the weakest solar max in 100 years.

    I would throw the main breaker if one was due and my power was shut off in advance anyway. Not sure what good that would do me in the end if the grid was fried. Power companies have contingency plans and they would likely shut down the grid and isolate as much as possible in advance if they thought it was at risk. The bigger the grid, the more at risk. Anything substantial arriving with less than 24 hours notice would probably be very worrying.

  3. Thanks AA; I have a Skystream wind turbine on my property that probably won’t survive the fry, but in the event it does, I have some battery back-up for charging should the worst scenario occur. I just don’t know what the consequences to wiring would be in that instance. I also have an emp shielded MILSPEC generator for back-up but wonder about the house wiring efficacy. I’m not worried, just trying to be proactive as I have many people who are relying on me without knowing it.

    I am quite philosophical about my role, but don’t want anything in my control to be missed.

  4. That link is good, AA. I’m gonna digest for a while, but our magnetic latitudes are virtually the same, so the risk is equally shared. Certainly not comforting for either of us other than some camaraderie.

  5. Ben, looking at that Loyd’s report, it’s long cables that pick up the magnetic disturbance and convert it into electrical energy, which the cables then deliver to whatever they’re connected to. On the power grid, this is usually a transformer. On the telephone network, this is exchange equipment and domestic telephone equipment.

    So yes, disconnecting your incoming ‘phone line where it connects to the rest of your system (the “Master Socket” on UK systems) will protect your ‘phone equipment, router, etc. And disconnecting your mains electricity at the master switch will protect your electrical appliances.

    But the real problems are the electricity grid’s transformers, and the ‘phone companies’ equipment. These are vulnerable to damage, but (1) it isn’t practical for the companies to have high numbers of replacements on hand, and (2) replacement is a complex job that could take days or weeks.

    So a likely scenario is that you disconnect all your stuff and sail through any geomagnetic storm with no damage to your own equipment, but then the power and/or ‘phones are down for days or weeks anyway.

    Your wind turbine should be OK because its cabling is just local. The same applies to your house wiring. The danger is to equipment attached to cables that are miles long.

  6. Just to add to what Clark said, a CME induced EMP is not as impulsive as a nuclear induced EMP and local equipment should be safe. At least that’s the case for a Carrington Class flare (or even considerably greater flare). If we were hit by an X5000’s associated CME the sudden impulse at initial CME impact might be so strong that damaging voltages could find their way into the turbine electronics. There now appears to be a suggestion the Sun not only can preduce this class of flares but also that it has done so before. Intervals may be on the order of thousands to hundreds of thousand of years.

    That class of flare and CME would kill all satellites not to mention give us a nasty blast of X-rays at the surface.

  7. In fact there is a suggestion that the 775 event may have been the Sun. If so we likely had an X1000+ class flare and associated CME impact.

    http://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.6897v2.pdf

    The AD775 cosmic event revisited: the Sun is to blame
    I.G. Usoskin, B. Kromer, F. Ludlow, J. Beer, M. Friedrich, G. A. Kovaltsov, S. K. Solanki, L. Wacker
    (Submitted on 27 Feb 2013 (v1), last revised 22 May 2013 (this version, v2))

    And this chart from my earlier link.

  8. Hey, a previous comment disappeared.

    AA/Clark; thanks for the perspective. It takes a lot off my mind. I had been preparing to buy material for a Faraday cage and the info you provided savedme some money.

  9. I can’t see any evidence this end of a vanished comment. Nothing stuck in moderation queue either. I did install some Amazon recommended Linux security patches and reboot a short while ago but that shouldn’t have made a comment vanish unless the system went down just before your post completed.

    When was the comment? I can check the webserver logs to see if something went wrong.

  10. “On the other hand, a nearby supernova, is almost also certainly not the right explanation. To generate the ener- gy needed to create the rapid 14C increase measured, the supernova would have to have been less than several hun- dred light years away. That wouldve made it so bright that it wouldve been visible in daylight. Also, no ∼ 1238-year- old supernova remnant has been detected, and it would be incredibly obvious if it existed. In fact, for example, the Crab nebula is 1000 years old and more than 6000 light years away, and is one of the brightest supernova remnants in the sky, a nearby supernova corresponding to the AD775 14C increase would be much stronger than the Crab nebula and much brighter in the sky.”

    http://www.cbpf.br/~icrc2013/papers/icrc2013-1149.pdf

    .

  11. Ben,

    I can’t watch SO when he tries to rubbish man-made climate change or promote the electric universe. In my opinion he doesn’t even begin to understand what he’s talking about on these topics and is making an idiot of himself.

    All of the things he seems to think are not taken into account are (at least to the best current understanding of the maximum effect they could have). He also seems to think that the UN is some super powerful evil organisation that dominates the world.

  12. AA; You have more history reading him than I. To me it seems human activity has an effect on the Earth but it is somewhat like a mosquito buzzing over my head. The data does seem to suggest CO2 has spiked as a result of the Industrial Revolution, and the wiggle-room for deniers is the stalled warming. You like George Carlin, the gadfly, right?

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmtSkl53h4

    Wait…when he talks about the ‘worriers’ is he looking at me?

  13. “When was the comment?”

    No worries. It was around the time of my first comment today. I’ve seen the same thing happen on other blogs. I don’t remember looking for it after I clicked POST and I may not have even ‘clicked’.

  14. Ben,

    Even making the statement “stalled warming” doesn’t really make statistical sense to me based on the limited time period. It is like saying that the seasons have stalled because say the third week in December in the UK was warmer than the last week in November. Climate variability is on a multi-decade long scale. Anything shorter is weather fluctuations. And that includes Solar fluctuations, ocean heat buffering, clouds etc, All the models show CO2 forcing winning over everything else given a few decades – even if all other factors “conspire” to work in the opposite direction at once. He seems to think that climate scientists and NASA just conveniently ignore some of his pet subjects. Officially they still leave a 5% chance they’ve missed something more important than CO2 forcing. Despite looking they haven’t found anything yet.

    If he really thinks there is an obvious correlation between CMEs and sun-diving comets it should be trivial to get a statistician to prove or disprove that. Except he can’t find one who has looked at the data and found a correlation and plenty have. Just because you think you see something doesn’t mean it is actually there. He suffers extremely from “confirmation bias” which seems to start with his politics.

    Carlin’s argument is not that we are not fucking everything up of course. It’s the exact opposite that we’re screwing up so badly we’ll soon be gone and the planet can heal itself over geological timescales and be better off in the long run from us going extinct.

  15. Bloody dangerous, living so close to one of these star thingies; if you ask me we should build plenty of well shielded nuclear reactors and shift the whole bloody planet into the depths of space where it’s nice and quiet. You can’t depend on stars. They’re unregulated, unshielded wildcat nuclear fusion reactors, unpredictably throwing off huge ionised flares and prone to blowing up with incredible violence. They should have been banned aeons ago.

  16. Ben,

    Sorry Ben. I think you miss his point 🙂 We do have a very significant deleterious effect on the earth. But yes over hundreds of thousands or millions of years we may be relatively insignificant assuming we don’t blow it up completely. Or do you think he means it for a minute when he says he hates environmentalists? Should we all just commit mass suicide because we are a nasty virus and let the planet start healing now?

    He’s a comedian. You are not supposed to take his words at face value. I can’t believe I am having to point that out.

  17. “If he really thinks there is an obvious correlation between CMEs and sun-diving comets it should be trivial to get a statistician to prove or disprove that”

    I thought we discussed the sun-diver whose recent impact was quickly followed by a non-earth directed X-class.

  18. “He’s a comedian. You are not supposed to take his words at face value. ”

    Most comedians (the good ones) are analytical observers of human behavior.

    Carlin became increasingly acerbic and angry (at times uncomfortably so) in his last decade of routines. Yes, I think he was serious in his observations and conclusions.

  19. “That bloody sun is about the only thing near here that’s any serious threat:”

    He had ‘gay marriage’ way down on the list Clark. 🙂

  20. “Bloody dangerous, living so close to one of these star thingies;”

    Can’t live with, or without them…

  21. Ben,

    Jesus Christ Ben. It’s the sort of comedy routine I might do on stage if I was really pissed off.

    “The planet isn’t going anywhere – we are – just another failed mutation.” He then calls on the planet to kill us with viruses before we really do become a big threat to it. Does he really mean that as well?

    But why should I listen to a self-described insignificant member of an insignificant species such as Carlin anyway on the subject anyway 🙂

  22. “But why should I listen to a self-described insignificant member of an insignificant species such as Carlin anyway on the subject anyway”

    Can’t you see Fedup in his routine?

  23. Ben,

    If Fedup wants to perform his “routine” in front of paying customers then that’s fine. I wouldn’t pay to see it though – doubt many would. I would have paid to see George Carlin though.

  24. AA; About 10 years ago I saw Carlin at a small venue. His routine for developing material was to test it first, then incorporate the winners into a stand-up for HBO.

    I didn’t see anything he should have thrown out. Just for perspective, he was Irish Catholic and was reared by sadistic Nuns. It’s a good thing he had the stage for venting his anger.

  25. thought we discussed the sun-diver whose recent impact was quickly followed by a non-earth directed X-class.

    Nobody denies for a moment that flares don’t sometimes occur as a comet approaches. Just if you look for a relationship to see if flares are more likely when a comet approaches you don’t find one (I’ve looked at the supposed evidence again). We’re at bloody solar max after all and there are hardly any X flares. compared to last time when fewer comets were observed. Perhaps the theory should be that sun-diving comets inhibit flares 🙂

    Something very large actually crashing into the Sun would likely produce something though. Especially if hit some region already unstable would be my guess.

  26. ” Perhaps the theory should be that sun-diving comets inhibit flares ”

    You know that I’m a neophyte and anything can sound plausible to me 🙂

    Those positive and negative zones in Sunspots would be effected by impact from a foreign body, but I am not informed enough to say in what way.

  27. Check us off as ‘Grid-ready’….

    “In a period of anxiety about cyberattacks and the vulnerability of the nation’s infrastructure, news that GridEx II would be held engendered yet more nervousness, some of it bizarre. One website tried to connect a joint training exercise in Hawaii between American and Chinese military personnel with the electricity drill . Another described it as a prelude to the government’s declaring martial law.”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/us/coast-to-coast-simulating-onslaught-against-power-grid.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

  28. Clark; Have you corresponded with Jon or Craig? It’s rather odd seeing like a dead blog. When do you check your email?

  29. I’ve had nothing from Jon or Craig. My last contact with Craig was in August at the festival. I haven’t heard from Jon since shortly after I asked him to revoke my moderator’s login, ages ago. I usually check my e-mail more than once a day. I’m at home again now but while I was travelling I didn’t check for up to two weeks. But I wouldn’t have missed anything because I’ve been careful and avoided the spammers, so I notice all new messages.

  30. Hullo Dudes….

    Heavy going around here with techie bits Lol

    there are lots of sources quoting the ice core samples indicate that the Carrington flare of 1859 was the largest event observed in the past 500 years.

    Yet the British Antarctic Survey people are saying that in only one Core sample out of 14 well-resolved ice core records from Greenland and Antarctica has a nitrate spike dated to 1859.

    http://nora.nerc.ac.uk/18118/

    Love the tale of How Carrington witnessed the event, all very interesting Stuff

    And this kool animation of Ison coming and Going.

    http://www.solarsystemscope.com/ison/

  31. I know the distancing on the animation is deceptive, but ISON does appear to pass through the tail, Brian.

  32. Ben, am fine…hope you are well

    Cheers for that link…and hope you are ok with all the grid power down opps talk.
    i was reading here n there that they have been expecting BIG things from this (24th ) solar cycle… and here’s the thing, We will get another Carrington flare, maybe not from cycle 24 but it will happen, and i think of all the death and destruction over Oil, Dollar wars ect. when we should be concentrating on protecting ourselves from the sun, space rocks,

    Some say the Elite are already well ahead in that respect, vast underground bunkers, Seed vaults

    But could i just share this image with everyone, i find it so touching ….is it leaving or arriving….i have it down as arriving at a new world… but what a beautiful image…what do yas think ?

    http://chasestone.deviantart.com/art/Grandma-152609831

  33. But who is expecting Big Things from this solar cycle?

    I can’t find anything in published research that suggests that in recent work. It’s a possibility certainly but everything so far this cycle (and forward projections) has been minimal. Perhaps the solar dynamo will throw one huge blast at us but I can’t find any immediate predictions of that.

    Personally I’m more worried about oil. We are not being directed to look at oil right now by the media. Ghawar (and friends) might be fucked for all we know.

  34. Ben,

    Unexpectedly one one the biggest Jethro Tull fans I know is just about to turn up at my house far later than he normally would. Just got a “You still up?” text (he would expect me to be up though) about the same time you posted “Thick as a Brick”.

    I therefore award you the synchronicity of the year award.

  35. “I therefore award you the synchronicity of the year award.”

    Seriously, those have been happening to me a lot lately. I will tell you about it some day. It’s in connection with my new email alert to Clark.

  36. Wayyyyy off topic is related to earlier reference to costs saved by not worrying so much about local integrity should a sun=based emp occur. (much thanks, again)

    I bought a cast-iron wood stove 2 years ago and have been slow to install. The cost for installing ( 500 dollars for the same venting pipe 2 years ago) to 1300 dollars.

    That’s what it costs to wait. It’s like I paid for it on the credit card 3 years ago then paid the minimum resulting in the final cost of $1300)

    Just a word to the wise.

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