Planets | Sun | Meteors
| Hubble | LIVE from Space
Aurora ALERT | April
6 | August 12 | November
7
Y2K | Jerusalem | Election
2000 | Links
|
|
Planets | Sun | Meteors
| Hubble | LIVE from Space
Aurora ALERT | April
6 | August 12 | November
7
Y2K | Jerusalem | Election
2000 | Links
The acronym "Y2K" is an abbreviation for the "year 2000." Why is it that on the news, they are referring to the current situation as "post-Y2K" as if the Y2K problem ENDED on 01-01-00 at 12:05 AM?
The period of vulnerability to the Y2K bug and other Y2K-related problems did not END on 01-01-00- it started on that date! The time for vigilance is not yet over, it has just begun!
The current year, "Y2K," ends on 12-31-2000, and so does the millennium. The "talking heads" have it back-assward.
A colleague at work put it best. When asked if Jan 1, 2000 was the beginning or the end of the millennium, he said "It's the beginning of the end."
The Millennium Matters
History
of the Gregorian Calendar
Y2K
Vigilance
Breaking
Y2K News
The picture on the left is a static shot that I saved when the camera
was panned back to reveal the 'Al Aqsa Mosque' aka the
"Dome of the Rock." The picture on the right is a Live
CAM of the Wailing Wall
(Second Temple Mount) in Jerusalem.
During the week of Rosh Hoshanah 5761 (Sep 30, 2000) rioting broke out in Jerusalem on the Temple Mount and spread throughout Israel. Yassir Arafat traveled to Amman Jordan to meet with King Abdullah of Jordan as Arab leaders called publicly for an Arab summit to devise a unified response to the latest events inside the "occupied territories."
You may want to keep this page bookmarked and check it several times a day for developments.
CNN Middle East Coverage
AP Breaking News
Links
Massive solar flares are occurring on the sun! Several times this year, interplanetary shock waves have bombarded earth with solar radiation, causing auroral displays much further south than normal. On April 5-6, 2000, a weakening of the earth's magnetic field combined with a massive solar eruption resulted in the aurora borealis (see below) being seen as far south as Texas! On August 12, during the peak of the Perseid meteor shower, a G3 geomagnetic storm caused the aurora borealis to be seen in the western USA.
These conditions will persist throughout most of the year 2000. Radio band communications will be disrupted when the sun is above the horizon; at night, the ionosphere will propagate radio waves beyond the horizon much more than average.
Check Space Weather Daily
Real
Time Images from SOHO
SOHO
Real Time Images- Summary Page, All Cameras
SOHO
Real Time Images from the LASCO C3 Coronagraph
Download
the 5/5/2000 Animated GIF
On April 6, 2000, the same night that many people were outside viewing the conjunction of the planets Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn, a rare red aurora was seen as far south as Texas!
The photo above was taken in North Carolina by Johnny Horne. It almost exactly reproduces what my family and I saw from our home in northern Virginia. Notice Orion in the lower left corner of the picture, and the Pleiades in the midst of the "red cloud." As fantastic as this photograph is, one thing that a 2-dimensional photo can not convey is that this "cloud" stretched from Orion in the southwest to the big dipper in the northeast sky!
Our entire family saw the aurora, including our daughters' nanny. whose name happens to be "Aurora." My 5 year old daughter Elisabeth asked " Why is God doing that Daddy?" and then concluded "He must know pink is my favorite color." She drew the picture above the following night.
More Links:
Brushfires
in the Sky- Aurora Photos from Florida, Texas, Georgia and more!
CNN
version of the Sky & Telescope News Story
Current LIVE CAM of the SUN from the SOHO Spacecraft
We
were not the only family outside that night in Northern Virginia
It happened again! On August 12, 2000, the night of the peak of
the Perseid meteor shower, a G3 geomagnetic storm occurred. Radio
propagation went ballistic! The aurora borealis was seen in the western
USA from Ohio to California.
Here is a gallery
of aurora photographs from the Space
Weather center.
More recent pix that made it to the Astronomy Picture of the Day archive:
It hasn't stopped - in fact the intensity of solar storms has increased in October and November 2000! The Space Weather page has put up even more aurora pictures galleries for October 5, October 28, and November 6-7, 2000 !
Coincidentally, two of these recent geomagnetic storms and auroral displays have coincided with events on earth:
In the United States, October 5 2000 was the night of the Vice Presidential
debate,
and November 6-7 was the night before Election Day!
May 5 2000:
Compare the artists conception above left (from Sky
& Telescope) with the actual image of the planets on the right.
The SOHO
C3 coronagraph also captured a "full halo" coronal mass ejection
(CME) on the same day with three planets in the field of view!
On May 15, Venus entered the field of view of the coronagraph camera from the right (west), and the Pleiades star cluster from the left (east). The Space Weather page provides daily updates, including the diagram below, and links into the NASA Space Environment page, and great space science articles such as this one: Brushfires in the Sky about the geomagnetic storm and aurora borealis on April 6, 2000.
5/17/2000:
11:42 UT
19:42 UT
On May 17, the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter was visible LIVE from SPACE to anyone connected to the internet! That event was the closest conjunction of those two planets since June 2 B.C., an event that I believe was the "Star of Bethlehem." The images of Venus and Jupiter were indistinguishable on the SOHO C3 Wide Angle camera.
In the weeks that followed, we watched all the other planets track across the field of view of the SOHO coronagraph.
More Links:
Sky &
Telescope Press Release on the Planetary Alignments
Christmas
Star for SOHO- NASA Press Release
Space Weather - Today in
Space
Hubble's photographic hall of fame includes: the deepest view ever of the universe in visible light; a peek at super massive galactic black holes; glimpses of star birth and planetary systems forming around other stars; images of eerie looking shells of glowing gas ejected by dying Sun-like stars; powerful blasts produced by the impact of a comet into the cloud tops of Jupiter; the surface of distant, frigid Pluto; and galaxies at the edge of space and time.
Sky & Telescope's
Latest News Page
On November 3, 2000, the ninth anniversary of that tragic event, and only days before the US Presidential election, the story of George "Dubya" Bush's drunk driving conviction was leaked to the press. That night, another interplanetary shockwave reached earth from the sun, and a geomagnetic storm caused aurora displays in the continental US.
As darkness fell on the night before the US Presidential election, the sky lit up with one of the most impressive displays of aurora borealis since the night of April 6-7, 2000. The graphic below shows the estimated intensity of the space storm- and notice the states in the US that were in the "red zone" - with the exception of Florida, they include the states that were "too close to call" - Iowa, Wisconsin, and Oregon...
In the diagram below, extracted from the Space Environment Center plots, the times are in "Universal Time" (UT) aka Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) so the date of Nov 8 at 0 Hrs UT was really 7 PM EST while the polls were still open.
[Courtesy http://www.millenngroup.com/]
In the diagram above, the author (Wayne Moody) points out some interesting facts. The "interplanetary shock wave" arrived at 0 Hrs UT on November 9, which was 7 PM EST on November 8- exactly 24 hours after the polls closed in most states in the eastern USA. But they fail to point out the significance of the red bars in the lower left corner of the diagram. Those red bars on the graph indicate that during the period from 0 Hrs to 12 Hrs UT on November 7, we were in the midst of a major geomagnetic storm during which the "Kp" level reached its highest possible value (10). The storm began to subside at 12 Hrs UT, which corresponds to 7 AM EST, or just about the time the polls were opening in the USA. As people began to vote, the atmosphere above North America was rich with radiation from space- similar to the way the air is rich with ozone after a thunderstorm.
And here we are in the year 2000, resorting to counting paper ballots by hand, and we will probably not know who our next president is until January 6, 2001 - the same time people in the 1800s learned the results of the election!
The election of 2000 has similarities to the elections of 1824, 1840, 1860, 1876, and 1888.
In 1824, John Quincy Adams was elected by the House even though he had not won a majority of the electoral vote NOR the popular vote. He was the son of a former president (John Adams), who had served as vice president of a very popular president (George Washington). Same name as his father, except for the middle initial.
The letters "Q" and "W" have the same point scores in the game of Scrabble.
The spell checker stops on the name "Lieberman" and suggests "Liberal"
as the correct spelling.
At midnight Friday November 17, 2000, the deadline passed for the arrival of absentee ballots in Florida. At the same moment, near 5 Hrs UT Friday/Saturday November 17/18, meteor observers in the Canary Islands saw a burst of Leonid meteors- over 345 meteors in one hour! This was a result of the earth encountering a steam of dust released by Comet Tempel-Tuttle in 1866! Abraham Lincoln saw the 1833 storm while still a young man in Illinois!
Email me your opinion: gcmastra@mcs.drexel.edu
Links to Previous Years "Synchronicity" pages...
There is a detective story hidden in these pages. Perhaps you would like to uncover the clues as I uncovered them? If you read these pages in chronological order by year, you can join me on my voyage of discovery as I deciphered the meaning of the the Gregorian Calendar, the Hebrew Calendar, the Metonic and Saros cycles of eclipses, the Millennium, the Y2K problem, the timing of the "Tribulation" and other aspects of the Book of Revelation. Here are some items to ponder:
(1) In 1995, the first images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope were released by NASA and caused a sensation among lay persons as well as the scientific community. When pictures of the Eagle Nebula in Sagittarius were shown on television in November 1995, many people reported being able to see faces and images of religious icons in the star clouds. To some viewers tuned into CNN on the night of November 3, the awesome images of "pillars of clouds" reminded some of scenes from the Old Testament/Exodus, and others saw parallels to the New Testament stories.
(2) In 1996, a new comet was discovered just weeks before it passed within a million miles of earth. Comet Hyakutake was the most spectacular comet of the century in my opinion as it lit the night sky around Easter 1996. Comet Hale-Bopp was already discovered and inbound for a close earth rendezvous in April 1997. The paths of both comets crossed each other at the same point in the sky exactly one year apart (on April 11) during Easter week.
(3) Three of the greatest comets of the century all occurred in the
last decade in the years 1996, 1997, and 1998.
They were: Hyakutake (1996), Hale-Bopp(1997), and SOHO (1998)...
(4) In May 2000 there were a series of close conjunctions
of each of the planets with each other in a very short span of time, including
a conjunction of the two brightest planets, Venus and Jupiter, which will
be their closest conjunction in over 2000 years. The last time they
ever got this close as viewed from earth was in June 2 B.C., and event
which I believe was the "Star
of Bethlehem." These conjunctions and alignments will have minimal
direct impact on the earth, although the alignment of most of the planets
on one side of the sun coinciding with "solar max" could have an impact
on solar activity and output. The real significance of these alignments
may only be symbolic. But if
the conjunctions of 2 B.C. really were the events that set the Magi on
their journey from Mesopotamia to Judea, then what could be the symbolic
meaning of these new alignments?
The
Simulacrum Effect
Media
First Strike
Intellectual
Exercise
What
is the Sign SIG?
More
on Clearwater Florida
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Join me on my quest for meaning in the universe...
... and let me join you on yours!
Write Me! (gcmastra@mcs.drexel.edu)
