So here I am, Sam Evans Brown reporting from Closet Studio, I think it's like 4.0.

And with me virtually on Zoom, like the entire world for some reason despite privacy concerns is

producer Taylor Quimby. Where does today's story begin? Well it begins as many stories

like this do a long long time ago with an old amateur scientist.

While engaged in the forenoon of Thursday, September 1st,

in taking my customary observation of the forms and positions of the solar spots, an appearance was

witnessed which I believe to be exceedingly rare.

So these are the words of 19th century amateur astronomer and Charles Darwin Beard impersonator

Richard Carrington. Now Carrington was, as everybody knows, the author of catalogue of 3,735 circumpolar stars.

A classic.

But we are here to talk about an event that happened in late summer of 1859 when he

witnessed history whilst observing the sun.

I had secured diagrams of all the groups and the touch spots,

and was engaged at the time and counting from a chronometer,

when, with the area of the Great North Group two patches of intensely bright and white light broke out

Now it may seem that a bright spot on the sun is of little consequence. So to translate

why this is such a big deal is Noel Lugaz, research associate professor at the Space Science

Center at the University of New Hampshire.

Typically, I mean, there are flares, what you call them,

so large emission of light from the sun every day.

But they are mostly visible in the ultraviolet an x-ray emissions so unless you have an

x-ray filter which at the time people didn't have you wouldn't see that but this one

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