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Readers! A November fund-raising drive!

 

It is unfortunately time for another November fund-raising campaign to support my work here at Behind the Black. I really dislike doing these, but 2025 is so far turning out to be a very poor year for donations and subscriptions, the worst since 2020. I very much need your support for this webpage to survive.

 

And I think I provide real value. Fifteen years ago I said SLS was garbage and should be cancelled. Almost a decade ago I said Orion was a lie and a bad idea. As early as 1998, long before almost anyone else, I predicted in my first book, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, that private enterprise and freedom would conquer the solar system, not government. Very early in the COVID panic and continuing throughout I noted that every policy put forth by the government (masks, social distancing, lockdowns, jab mandates) was wrong, misguided, and did more harm than good. In planetary science, while everyone else in the media still thinks Mars has no water, I have been reporting the real results from the orbiters now for more than five years, that Mars is in fact a planet largely covered with ice.

 

I could continue with numerous other examples. If you want to know what others will discover a decade hence, read what I write here at Behind the Black. And if you read my most recent book, Conscious Choice, you will find out what is going to happen in space in the next century.

 

 

This last claim might sound like hubris on my part, but I base it on my overall track record.

 

So please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. I could really use the support at this time. There are five ways of doing so:

 

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

 

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation. Takes about a 10% cut.
 

3. A Paypal Donation or subscription, which takes about a 15% cut:

 

4. Donate by check. I get whatever you donate. Make the check payable to Robert Zimmerman and mail it to
 
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652

 

You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.


The Sun’s fizzle continues

On June 4 NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center posted its monthly update of the ongoing sunspot cycle of the Sun. Now that I am back from Nevada, I’ve had a chance to take a look at it, and have posted the new graph for April below the fold.

May sunspot graph

Though sunspot activity in May showed a slight increase, it nowhere matched the activity levels predicted by scientists (as indicated by the red line). Though the Sun’s activity has ramped up, and is even today sending two coronal mass ejections directly towards the Earth, the Sun is also continuing to struggle to produce sunspots.

Meanwhile, the solar scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center have not revised their prediction for the peak of the upcoming solar maximum, despite the weak numbers in May. They presently predict a sunspot number of 60 at maximum, the peak arriving in the spring of 2013. (The Marshall prediction uses a different sunspot numbering system than the graph above, which is why the solar maximum peak prediction for each is different, 60 compared to about 90. However, the actual activity predicted by both is really the same.) This prediction would make this upcoming solar maximum “the smallest sunspot cycle in about 100 years,” as they say on their website.

If the trends shown by the graph above continue, however, it is likely that the peak at maximum will be far weaker than this prediction, making it the weakest in several centuries. Some solar scientists are even predicting that the Sun might follow this weak maximum with the first Grand Minimum in five hundred years, giving us a period of decades where there are no sunspots at all. And the last time that happened, in the 1600s, the Earth experienced the Little Ice Age, a time when there were years with no summers at all, resulting in crop failures and famine.

Maybe global warming might not be such a bad thing after all!

Genesis cover

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 print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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

2 comments

  • jwing

    With humility, we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors and are here only because they had the intestinal fortitude to carry on. My only hope is that whatever this amazing, beautiful life-giving earth throws at us ( includeing its sun), we can do honor to all those humans that suffered through plagues, ice ages and drudgery of less technological times and quit our whining. As humans, we can figure our way out of anything nature conjures up…it’s in our DNA.

  • Joe Ellison

    Thanks for this update. I will definitely need this.

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