Big Bear Solar Observatory reopened Monday November 3 after a six-day shutdown cause by California’s wildfires.  Mandatory evacuation mean the center’s director Philip Goode had to leave his home on Big Bear Lake and return to New Jersey, where the observatory is managed by the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) in Newark. But no harm came to observatory staff, property, or equipment. >>

A major solar flare, possibly the second largest ever recorded, erupted today at 6:30 a.m. The intensity of the flare has sent a space storm careening towards the Earth. If the storm’s magnetic field is in the right direction – opposite that of the earth – it could cause problems when it reaches us Wednesday. It could knock out power grids, upset satellites and disrupt GPS signals. More benignly, if the weather is clear, people who peer into the northern sky on Wednesday night could see a shimmer of lights known as an aurora,” says NJIT physicist Dale Gary. >>

 “This storm is predicted to be a strong event, but events of this size are not too unusual,” says Dale Gary, Ph.D., professor of physics at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT).  “We don’t expect to see it cause an unusually large amount of activity on earth. We see an event of this sort happening on the average of once every 30 days or during an 11-year solar cycle, about 200 times.” >>