March 30, 2001 - Art Bell
04:59
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| All right, to give you some idea of what's occurring this night right now, outside right now, let's go first to, I guess, New Mexico. | |
| And here's Richard C. Hoagland. | |
| Hey, Richard. | |
| Hi, Art. | |
| How you doing? | |
| Get off the radio and get outside or take a long mic outside. | |
| You're not going to want to miss this. | |
| This reminds me of the night we did the Leonid Show. | |
| Yes. | |
| And I was standing outside on the balcony. | |
| Sure. | |
| You can see this describing all this weirdness. | |
| Oh, there you are. | |
| You're in the mountains of New Mexico. | |
| We're 8,000 feet up in the Manzano Mountains, and it is amazing. | |
| I have not seen anything like this since the 1960s when I lived in New England, which, of course, is a lot farther north than we are here. | |
| Oh, yes. | |
| We're about 35 north. | |
| And what's amazing is that these streamers and the color is extending past the zenith to the south of it. | |
| Oh really? | |
| I am looking to the southeast. | |
| Wow. | |
| I'm watching Scorpio just rising and there's this big huge splotch of deep red vibrating color. | |
| It's bright enough you can actually see it even though color vision at night isn't very good. | |
| This is bright enough to be seen and it's a good That's astounding. | |
| Gee, like I said, maybe they're singing in Mazatlan for all I know. | |
| Well, I would think that they actually could look north and see this. | |
| This is just phenomenal. | |
| I mean, this huge mega sunspot complex, which as you said is about 16 times the size of the Earth, will probably not surprise some of you who have been listening to me over the years. | |
| It's the peak of the sunspot cycle, and it's sitting exactly at 19 and a half north on the sun. | |
| And it let loose with this enormous eruption, the CME. | |
| And the particles take a while to get here, and they'll probably be streaming past us for the next 24 | |
| hours or so. | |
| We should go outside. | |
| Yeah, but this is going to be the prime time night, I guess. | |
| The prime time. By all means, don't miss it now. | |
| We even woke up some people in New York who were very upset that we woke them up, | |
| Take a look! | |
| You're not going to see this again, but I'm looking out directly north. | |
| I can see Polaris. | |
| The one thing you don't want to do, Richard, before you wake anybody up anywhere, is check the weather forecast. | |
| You know, when you wake them up, it's alright, but when they go outside and it's raining, they're going to come back to the phone not happy. | |
| It is incredibly clear here, as it usually is in Mexico. | |
| Sure. | |
| And I'm looking north now, past Polaris, and the entire northern horizon To about 30 degrees up, which is about a third of the way to the zenith. | |
| It looks like pre-dawn. | |
| It looks like dawn is about to break. | |
| Yes. | |
| It's a bluish green. | |
| Oh my. | |
| It's fluorescing. | |
| If I look overhead, a little while ago there were streamers that were coming up past the Gemini and through Leo, and they were all bunching like a comet. | |
| It looked like a vibrant comet, and you could actually see it flickering. | |
| Like you're inside some giant cathode ray tube, which is what this really is. | |
| Actually, it is, yeah. | |
| This is electrons and protons spiraling around the magnetic lines of force of the Earth. | |
| The magnetic field of the Earth is being hit by these enormous storms of particles, and it's ringing like a bell, and then it's cascading down into the atmosphere, and you're seeing the colors are caused by various emissions from the various elements, nitrogen and oxygen, things like that. | |
| And it comes and goes, comes in waves, and the waves are moving from west to east. | |
| We're in New Mexico. | |
| We're just now opposite the sun. | |
| It's midnight. | |
| Now, Richard, isn't that interesting? | |
| I watched one move from the east to the west. | |
| Well, they're moving from west to east here. | |
| Okay? | |
| That's really interesting. | |
| I watched a whole part of the red sky, Richard, move from the east nearly toward Las Vegas, from where I am, all the way to the west toward California. | |
| Oh, well now, toward you, toward the west, on the portable here, when I change my orientation, the antenna pattern goes weird. | |
| I'm seeing red streamers, pale, large, diffused red streamers. | |
| But if I look to the north, they're brilliant blue-green, and I can now begin to see spikes in them, like long, spiky shafts coming up, like the classic photos you've seen of Aurora. | |
| And it's so bright! | |
| Get a long mic cord and go outside and do the rest of the show. | |
| I wish I had that long of a mic cord. | |
| I might get myself on a portable phone if it really gets berserk out there. | |
| I'm not going to be able to stand it. | |
| It's going to go on all night. | |
| I know it is. | |
| For everybody who's got, as you said, a family member who's still flumbering peacefully, check the weather, then get them up because you're not going to want them to miss this. | |
| This is literally probably the worst in a lifetime event because we're at the peak of the cycle. | |
| And if we look at our hyperdimensional model, we're at the peak of several other cycles, so this particular cycle is the biggie. | |
| All right, Richard. | |
| Thank you very much, and good night. | |
| Enjoy the show. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Take care. | |
| You'll never see anything like this again, I absolutely guarantee you will not. |
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