The fizzle continues
NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center today posted its monthly update of the ongoing sunspot cycle of the Sun. As I do every month, I am posting this graph, which you can see below the fold.
As the graph clearly shows, the Sun’s sunspot activity continues to be far below the prediction (indicated by the red line). In June activity dipped slightly, returning to the numbers seen in March. This is not what we should be seeing at this point in the ramp up to solar maximum next year. Rather than dipping, sunspot activity should be rising.
The trend, as indicated by the bright blue line, continues to suggest that the peak, predicted for the spring of 2013, is going to be far less than predicted. And the peak, as predicted, would be the weakest maximum in a hundred years. If that peak instead turns out to be as weak as the trend line suggests, it would be weakest in centuries, since the long Maunder Minimum of the 1600s, when there were no sunspots for decades.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
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