Remember sunspots? They were quite the thing about 10 years ago, then they seemed to go away on an extended vacation.
A couple of days back, something absolutely whomped on the Japanese fax I was trying to copy on 22 MHz. No big deal, just the noise came up about 15 dB. I thought the neighbors had turned on some new consumer electronic device.
The neighbor had, but it was our neighboring star. It was a solar radio burst caused by energetic electrons from a large sunspot group (Region 1057) exciting plasmas in the sun's corona.
2010 has had only 6 days with no sunspots so far, compared to 2009 when there were 260.
There's more at http://www.spaceweather.com/ .
