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Readers!

 

It is now July, time once again to celebrate the start of this webpage in 2010 with my annual July fund-raising campaign.

 

This year I celebrate the fifteenth anniversary since I began Behind the Black. During that time I have done more than 33,000 posts, mostly covering the global space industry and the related planetary and astronomical science that comes from it. Along the way I have also felt compelled as a free American citizen to regularly post my thoughts on the politics and culture of the time, partly because I think it is important for free Americans to do so, and partly because those politics and that culture have a direct impact on the future of our civilization and its on-going efforts to explore and eventually colonize the solar system.

 

You can’t understand one without understanding the other.

 

Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent independent analysis you don’t find elsewhere. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn’t influenced by donations by established companies or political movements. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.

 

You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four 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.
 

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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.


Longest blank sun since 2010

The sun has now been blank of sunspots for five days, the longest such stretch since 2010, during the last stages of the last solar minimum.

Nor is this blank stretch over. Though I have no doubt that sunspots will return to the Sun in the next few days, this sudden arrival of blank days suggests again that the solar maximum might be ending far sooner than presently predicted.

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. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. 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

9 comments

  • Willi

    Spots on the far side aren’t counted, right?

  • For purposes of determining sunspot numbers, yes, farside spots are not counted. This is simply to maintain a consistent counting system from before the space age, when there were no space probes capable of seeing the far side.

  • mpthompson

    Do we currently have space probes to monitor the far side of the sun on a regular basis? My memory whether we launched such probes is vague.

  • We have a pair of satellites called Stereo specifically designed to see the entire face of the sun.

    Update: I forgot to add that one of the two Stereo craft was lost in 2014, which makes it difficult to get complete coverage at this time.

  • Willi

    So, if a sun spot can’t be seen then it doesn’t exist…

  • Willi: Of course not. As I said, they only count the spots on the near side because, until the space age, that was all they could see and count. In order to have the sunspot count remain consistent they use only the nearside spots in the count. However, in studying the sun and its solar cycle solar sciences absolutely do not ignore the far side. This is why the Stereo spacecraft were launched and built, to give sciences a 360 degree view of the sun.

  • Willi

    I wasn’t being serious, just trying to play off “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it…”

  • Joe

    Willi, read your second comment and knew exactly where you were going with it, humor not lost on all of us!

  • Max

    If the dark spots on the sun were dark matter…
    Then they would exist even though no one has ever seen one :)

    A news report today said “the ozone hole is smaller this year”. They’re giving the banning of CFCs the credit even though it’s always small during a solar decline. Someday they will connect the dots between ozone consumption and stratospheric clouds from solar activity.

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