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This Week’s Sky at a Glance, August 23 – 31 - Sky & Telescope
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‘Pluto is a planet’: NASA official risks sparking science civil war with controversial declaration — RT World News
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NASA's Mars Rover Will Fall Asleep Today As The Red Planet Is Swallowed By The Sun
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Astronomers find bizarre planet 'unlike any other discovered so far' - CNET
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SpaceX launches "Starhopper" on dramatic test flight today - CBS News
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It's Time We Went Back To Neptune. NASA’s Photos Are Now 30 Years Old (And Its Moon Has An Ocean)
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Weird asteroid gives scientists 'very big surprise' by changing color - CNET
Black supermoon 2019 is tonight - here's where it will be visible in the UK - Mirror Online
Several northern US states will be treated to a northern lights show this weekend – BGR
Houston, we have a cookie: Former Nasa astronaut on baking in space
China's Lunar Rover Has Found Something Weird on the Far Side of the Moon | Space
Well...There goes the neighborhood, I hope they're low yield.
Plans are for a Moon outpost to be in place by 2024. Starting in 2020 the space launch system and Orion are to be tested to the Moon and back to work out the bugs then the launch system is to be built in '24 for a Mars liftoff between 2030 - 2033 but this says otherwise: Independent report concludes 2033 human Mars mission is not feasible
160 years ago today:
Just imagine how the world would react with the electronics in use today.At 11:18 AM on the cloudless morning of Thursday, September 1, 1859, 33-year-old Richard Carrington—widely acknowledged to be one of England's foremost solar astronomers—was in his well-appointed private observatory. Just as usual on every sunny day, his telescope was projecting an 11-inch-wide image of the sun on a screen, and Carrington skillfully drew the sunspots he saw.
On that morning, he was capturing the likeness of an enormous group of sunspots. Suddenly, before his eyes, two brilliant beads of blinding white light appeared over the sunspots, intensified rapidly, and became kidney-shaped. Realizing that he was witnessing something unprecedented and "being somewhat flurried by the surprise," Carrington later wrote, "I hastily ran to call someone to witness the exhibition with me. On returning within 60 seconds, I was mortified to find that it was already much changed and enfeebled." He and his witness watched the white spots contract to mere pinpoints and disappear.
It was 11:23 AM. Only five minutes had passed.
Just before dawn the next day, skies all over planet Earth erupted in red, green, and purple auroras so brilliant that newspapers could be read as easily as in daylight. Indeed, stunning auroras pulsated even at near tropical latitudes over Cuba, the Bahamas, Jamaica, El Salvador, and Hawaii.
Even more disconcerting, telegraph systems worldwide went haywire. Spark discharges shocked telegraph operators and set the telegraph paper on fire. Even when telegraphers disconnected the batteries powering the lines, aurora-induced electric currents in the wires still allowed messages to be transmitted.
"What Carrington saw was a white-light solar flare—a magnetic explosion on the sun," explains David Hathaway, solar physics team lead at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Source
You'd be taking a selfie and possibly the phone would start smoking in your hand. Communications, traffic grids, cars, planes, credit card pos, (point of sale), GPS, anything electronic and that would include the Internet and TenFourms would be down.
For how long? How long would it take to replace and rebuild the electronics to run those systems, your guess is as good as mine.