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Have you seen this?????? alot scary!!!!!!

The sky ïûòàåò Egypt a fiery rain

Îêñàíà ÃÎËÎËÎÁÎÂÀ, on July, 16, 17:02

The Arabian mass-media transfer, that the present(true) fiery downpour has fallen upon a number(line) of villages in southern Egyptian province Ñîõàã - so has characterized the unusual phenomenon local population. However, behind the beautiful name serious accident which already has ruined some inhabitants of the country disappears.

Heated "drops" in huge quantity(amount) fall from the sky on roofs of buildings, setting fire to straw covering them and a reed. Constructions flash as a match, the flame has captured already more than 80 apartment houses. From an asthma and burns have suffered about 60 person, two small children were lost at least. In the Egyptian settlements where the fiery rain goes the third day, firemen constantly are on duty.

Police and forces of safety of the country conduct consequence(investigation). Authorities try to find out an origin so strange unknown hitherto a phenomenon. There are already some versions of an event. ïîãîðåëüöû are inclined to trust in overseas metamorphosises, they assert(approve), that on their houses anything fell other, as fiery spheres.

Others try to explain tragedy household incidents: the some people speak, that when the temperature of air reaches(achieves) +55°Ñ, at pets and birds the wool and feathers starts to decay. The cat who has received a burn or the rabbit starts to rush in a panic on a court yard and climbs up a roof of houses that leads to to distribution of fire.

However scientists count, that speech, most likely, goes about a meteoric rain: pieces of breed flying from space light up in an atmosphere. However, the exact reason of mass fires till now and remains a riddle.

For the information(inquiry): the Meteoric rain - the unique astronomical phenomenon. His(its) kinds which can be observed at various times year and with different periodicity are known some.

For example, " a star downpour ", "Leonid" named astronomers, it is possible to see seldom enough - each 33 years when about the Earth comet Òåìïëà-Òàòòëà flies by. "Leonids" are her(it) ÷àñòè÷êè which breaking away, generously shower our planet.

The name has received the phenomenon because there are meteorites from that part of a space where there is constellation Ëåî. Encyclopaedic editions assert(approve), that the most ancient on supervision the meteoric stream has been marked by Chinese in 1768 B.C.

Time in 130 years the Earth passes through a dust tail of a comet of Swift - Òàòòëà and then meteoric stream Ïåðñåèä reaches(achieves) the maximal activity, dumping(resetting) on us thousand "tail" meteorites.

And in general, " falling stars " can be observed every year in second half of summer(years). Always was considered, that they do not represent for people of danger - ÷àñòè÷êè reach our planet extremely seldom, and in a history yet there was no case that the meteorite has done much harm to the person. To tell the truth, more than 50 years in the Great Britain the fragment of a meteorite has killed the cow

Another one..

Did Meteorite Strike Central Florida?

POSTED: 10:53 am EDT July 16, 2004
UPDATED: 11:35 am EDT July 16, 2004

CASSELBERRY, Fla. -- Speculation about a July Fourth meteorite strike in Seminole County has many area residents searching their yards for answers.

Video

Meteor May Have Struck Casselberry Area

From Oviedo, to Maitland, to Casselberry, witnesses claim to have heard a large boom and saw bright flashes of light across the evening holiday skies, WESH NewsChannel 2 reported.

It's creating a meteorite buzz on local radio stations, WESH NewsChannel 2 reported.

"I saw this crazy light, and it was really bright," said Casselberry resident Diana Felise. "The entire house was rattling. We thought the pictures were going to fall off the wall."

If a meteor did strike the area, it is believed to have hit somewhere around Red Bug Road and state Road 434, but Casselberry police officials said they're convinced it was nothing more than a big bolt of lightning since there was a severe storm in the area that night.

"Lightning, thunderstorms, welcome to Florida," said Lt. Dennis Stewart of the Casselberry Police Department.

Many residents, however, still believe it was a meteorite. Rick Wega shot video of the bright lights and remains convinced it was not a storm-induced effect.

"The way it shook the ground isn't like no other lightning," said Wega, "I’ve been around a lot of lightning."

Experts, on the other hand, said that until someone finds a piece of a meteorite in the area, it will remain an unsolved mystery.

A meteorite is a small particle of matter that falls to Earth, and the last one to reportedly strike the area hit in Lake County in 1918. Because of such rarity, meteorites are very valuable, and in some cases, one gram of a meteorite can be valued at $10,000.

hhhmmmmm...things are heating up...

FIRBALL OVER PACIFIC
Timothy Snodgrass
Jul 15, 2004

Last night at approximately 3:00am I walked outside to gaze at the night sky, and no sooner than I walked out the door I witnessed a spectacular fireball, so enormous it could only be described as fearful, triggering a sonic boom so loud that it forced our family to temporarily flee from the seashore for safety about a mile inland (because we could not estimate the size of the object and were concerned about tsunami if it hit the Pacific). It was visible even through fog, zig-zagging through the night sky leaving a green trail of fire and smoke. Apparently, Asia was not the only region which witnessed the phenomenon. Police emergency lines were lit up as far as Finland from people observing the spectacular meteor shower. In the Philippines, I only witnessed the one large fragment due to the fog and light drizzle. Impact could be heard approximately 45 seconds after the sighting, and sounded like a large canon exploding over the Pacific. I am now in the Manila area, where for the first time in over a month I have been able to enjoy lightning-fast Internet connections. During the upcoming week I will be attempting to get caught up on responding to the over 300 un-opened emails I have piling up in my Inbox, so please be patient if I have not yet responded to your email ~ I promise to get back before Armageddon.

MORE HERE...

http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?t=108234

They are talking about the sun spots and the weather on Art Bell, Coast to Coast tonight...
Europeans cope with rain, cold and even snow

VIENNA -- Snowball fights in July. Mulled wine instead of wine coolers. Thermostats set on high. Spring has come and gone, fall approaches and Europeans from Oslo to Budapest are still waiting for summer weather. Much of Europe woke up to yet another day of chilly temperatures and rain yesterday, adding to weeks of miserable weather gripping the continent from Scandinavia to parts of the Balkans.

It's a big change from last summer, when a heat wave was blamed for the deaths of thousands. Except for southern Europe, this July has been wet and glacial so far.

On many days, temperatures have been half that of last year, when the mercury sat at 35 Celsius or higher for weeks.

Meteorologists say the comparison with last summer is misleading because 2003 was unusually hot and dry. "It's a little cooler than it should be, but it's not too bad," Vienna forecaster Ernst Rudel said of the last few weeks, describing the rains sweeping Austria this summer as "a little more precipitation than normal."

But the wacky weather has in some areas led to virtual winter in July.

Instead of hiking, tourists in Germany's Bavarian Alps have worked up a sweat with snowball fights and sleigh rides after heavy snowfalls dusted peaks and some valleys under 2,000 metres.

In central Germany's Thuringia forest, guests gathered for an open-air theatre performance clasped icy fingers around cups of mulled wine usually served at winter apres-ski parties.

Britons, whose summer weather has been the envy of no one over the years, have even less to be happy about than usual. The July cold snap prompted the British Gas company to put its winter emergency contingency plan into operation to meet a surge in demand for central heating.

Shrewsbury in northwest England had a temperature of 11.4 C on July 8 -- the coldest ever for the month. To the south, the town of Wittering, near Cambridge, absorbed 121.5 millimetres of rainfall between July 1 and 8 -- 2 1/2 times the monthly average.

The sun has shone a miserly three days so far in July in most of Britain. It was the same yesterday, St. Swithin's Day, when folklore says rain means another 40 days of downpours.

Elliot Frisby, a spokesperson for the VisitBritain tourism board, kept a stiff upper lip: "We don't sell Britain as a sun, sea and sand destination."

Rain also left Scandinavia gasping for relief. In Denmark, the average precipitation for June was 74 millimetres, a third above normal, while more rain fell last weekend in Sweden's Smaaland province than is normal for all of July.

Still, every cloud has a silver lining.

Angela Steinkellner, who runs an indoor pool and spa south of Vienna, said demand was up 40 per cent for the tanning machines.

I have no idea what a I am talking about but haveing a blast trying to figure it out...

Sunspots reaching 1,000-year high

By Dr David Whitehouse
BBC News Online science editor

Sunspots are plentiful nowadays
A new analysis shows that the Sun is more active now than it has been at anytime in the previous 1,000 years.
Scientists based at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich used ice cores from Greenland to construct a picture of our star's activity in the past.

They say that over the last century the number of sunspots rose at the same time that the Earth's climate became steadily warmer.

This trend is being amplified by gases from fossil fuel burning, they argue.

'Little Ice Age'

Sunspots have been monitored on the Sun since 1610, shortly after the invention of the telescope. They provide the longest-running direct measurement of our star's activity.

The variation in sunspot numbers has revealed the Sun's 11-year cycle of activity as well as other, longer-term changes.

In particular, it has been noted that between about 1645 and 1715, few sunspots were seen on the Sun's surface.

This period is called the Maunder Minimum after the English astronomer who studied it.

Ice cores record climate trends back beyond human measurements
It coincided with a spell of prolonged cold weather often referred to as the "Little Ice Age". Solar scientists strongly suspect there is a link between the two events - but the exact mechanism remains elusive.

Over the past few thousand years there is evidence of earlier Maunder-like coolings in the Earth's climate - indicated by tree-ring measurements that show slow growth due to prolonged cold.

In an attempt to determine what happened to sunspots during these other cold periods, Dr Sami Solanki and colleagues have looked at concentrations of a form, or isotope, of beryllium in ice cores from Greenland.

The isotope is created by cosmic rays - high-energy particles from the depths of the galaxy.

The flux of cosmic rays reaching the Earth's surface is modulated by the strength of the solar wind, the charged particles that stream away from the Sun's surface.

And since the strength of the solar wind varies over the sunspot cycle, the amount of beryllium in the ice at a time in the past can therefore be used to infer the state of the Sun and, roughly, the number of sunspots.

Latest warming

Dr Solanki is presenting a paper on the reconstruction of past solar activity at Cool Stars, Stellar Systems And The Sun, a conference in Hamburg, Germany.

He says that the reconstruction shows the Maunder Minimum and the other minima that are known in the past thousand years.

But the most striking feature, he says, is that looking at the past 1,150 years the Sun has never been as active as it has been during the past 60 years.

Over the past few hundred years, there has been a steady increase in the numbers of sunspots, a trend that has accelerated in the past century, just at the time when the Earth has been getting warmer.

The data suggests that changing solar activity is influencing in some way the global climate causing the world to get warmer.

Over the past 20 years, however, the number of sunspots has remained roughly constant, yet the average temperature of the Earth has continued to increase.

This is put down to a human-produced greenhouse effect caused by the combustion of fossil fuels.

This latest analysis shows that the Sun has had a considerable indirect influence on the global climate in the past, causing the Earth to warm or chill, and that mankind is amplifying the Sun's latest attempt to warm the Earth.

FYI..I cannot remember everyone that was watching all this so ping anyone I left out.
PRESS RELEASE
Date Released: Saturday, July 17, 2004
Source: Marshall Space Flight Center
Voyager 1, Prepare for Action

At the outer limits of our solar system, a solar shock wave is about to overtake NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft.

When Voyager 1 signals NASA, which it does almost every day, there's usually not much to report. The spacecraft is nearly 9 billion miles (14.5 billion km) from the sun, at the edge of our solar system. It's quiet out there, dark and uneventful.

A solar blast wave is heading for the spacecraft, and "it could arrive at any moment," says Ed Stone, project scientist for the Voyager mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Remember the solar storms of October and November 2003? Giant sunspots unleashed some of the most powerful flares in recorded history; the explosions hurled billion-ton clouds of gas, called coronal mass ejections (CMEs), into the solar system. When the CMEs reached Earth, auroras appeared as far south as Florida, and our planet gained a new radiation belt that persisted for weeks.

Almost a year later, people are still talking about what happened. Well - the storm isn't over. Clouds spit out by the sun during those historic weeks have been traveling through the solar system ever since, and they're about to overtake Voyager 1.

Other spacecraft have already been hit.

On Oct. 28, 2003, a CME swept past Mars Odyssey, in Mars orbit. Intense radiation disabled one of the craft's science instruments, the Martian Radiation Environment Experiment (MARIE), designed, ironically, to study solar storms and space radiation. In the weeks that followed, CMEs buffeted Ulysses near Jupiter, and Cassini on its way to Saturn. Neither spaceship was harmed.

When one of the CMEs reached Saturn, Cassini detected bursty radio emissions signaling a magnetic storm around the ringed planet. Saturn (like Earth and Jupiter) has a global magnetic field that wraps around the planet, enveloping it in a protective bubble called the magnetosphere. When a CME hits, the magnetosphere reverberates ("a magnetic storm"); auroras appear; plasmas inside the magnetosphere begin to emit radio waves - but the planet itself is safe.

"The blast wave was powerful enough to spark a magnetic storm all the way out at Saturn, almost ten times farther from the sun than Earth. That's impressive," marvels Stone.

October. November. December. "The CMEs kept traveling outward," says Stone. January. February. March. "Some of the CMEs merged, the faster clouds having scooped up the slower ones." April. "The shock wave hit Voyager 2."

Voyager 1 and 2 are the most distant spacecraft in the solar system. They left Earth in the late 1970's, visited Jupiter and Saturn (Voyager 2 also went to Uranus and Neptune), then headed for the stars. Voyager 2 is now 7 billion miles from Earth, and Voyager 1 is almost 9 billion miles away.

Soon these spacecraft will reach the edge of the sun's magnetosphere, or "heliosphere," a vast magnetic bubble containing all nine planets. Outside the bubble lies interstellar space. Inside ... the Voyagers are still within range of solar storms.

The shock wave hit Voyager 2 traveling 600 km/s, or 1.3 million mph. (For comparison, CMEs left the sun last October going 1500 to 2000 km/s, "so there has been substantial deceleration," notes Stone.) The physical force was slight, less than the touch of a feather--the spacecraft didn't go tumbling. Neither did radiation cause problems. The storm had diffused over such a great volume by the time it reached Voyager 2, that "no damage was done," says Stone.

In fact, the encounter was good. Voyager 2 measured (indirectly) the speed of the shock, as well as its composition, temperature and magnetism. These data are invaluable, says Stone. Combined with measurements from Mars Odyssey, Ulysses, Cassini and other spacecraft, they show how far-ranging CMEs evolve and dissipate. One day human astronauts will be "out there," and mission planners need to know what to expect.

All that remains is Voyager 1.

Based on the velocity of the blast wave when it hit Voyager 2, "we expected the shock to reach Voyager 1 on June 26th," says Stone. " We're still waiting." It's possible the wave, irregular in structure, will simply miss Voyager 1.

But it won't miss the edge of the heliosphere--it can't. When the shock wave gets there, Stone says, there might be a 2 to 3 kHz radio burst signaling the impact, akin to the radio emissions Cassini detected when the wave hit Saturn's magnetic field, but at much lower frequencies. Voyager 1 has a receiver on board that can record such bursts and report them to Earth.

That's not all: the blast wave will push the edge of the heliosphere outward as much as 600 million km, Stone believes, and then there will be a rebound. For months the outer layer of the sun's magnetic bubble might slowly sweep back and forth over Voyager 1.

For Stone and his colleagues, who've have been waiting decades for Voyager 1 to reach the outer limits of the solar system, this is an exciting time. Solar shock waves. Radio bursts. The heliosphere itself bulging and rebounding.

It's not so uneventful out there, after all.

The Sun Goes Haywire

The Sun Goes Haywire

Using data archived by NOAA's Space Environment Center, Francis Reddy created this plot of sunspot number and X-class solar flares during the last three solar cycles.

Huntsville AL (SPX) Jul 12, 2004
November 12, 2003: Imagine you're in California. It's July, the middle of summer. The sun rises early; bright rays warm the ground. It's a great day to be outside. Then, suddenly, it begins to snow - not just a little flurry, but a swirling blizzard that doesn't stop for two weeks.

That's what forecasters call unseasonal weather.

It sounds incredible, but "something like that just happened on the sun," says David Hathaway, a solar physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.

Only a few weeks ago solar activity was low. The face of the sun was nearly blank - "very few sunspots," says Hathaway - and space weather near Earth was mild.

"Mild is just what we expect at this point in the 11-year solar cycle," he explains.

"The most recent maximum was in 2001, and solar activity has been declining ever since."

Then, suddenly, in late October the sun began to behave strangely. Three giant sunspots appeared, each one larger than the planet Jupiter.

In California where smoke from wildfires dimmed the sun enough to look straight at it, casual sky watchers were startled by the huge blotches on the sun. One of them, named "sunspot 486," was the biggest in 13 years.

Sunspots cause solar flares and, usually, the biggest flares come from the biggest spots. The three giant sunspots unleashed eleven X-class flares in only fourteen days - equaling the total number observed during the previous twelve months. "This was a big surprise," says Hathaway.

The effects on Earth were many: Radio blackouts disrupted communications. Solar protons penetrated Earth's upper atmosphere, exposing astronauts and some air travelers to radiation doses equal to a medical chest X-ray.

Auroras appeared all over the world - in Florida, Texas, Australia and many other places where they are seldom seen.

Researchers rank solar flares according to their x-ray power output. C-flares are the weakest. M-flares are middling-strong. X-flares are the most powerful.

Each category has subdivisions: e.g., X1, X2, X3 and so on. A typical X-flare registers X1 or X2. On Nov. 4th, sunspot 486 unleashed an X28 flare- the most powerful ever recorded.

"In 1989 a flare about half that strong caused a widespread power blackout in Quebec," recalls Hathaway. Last week's blast was aimed away from Earth, so its effects on our planet were slight - a bit of good luck.

All this happened two years after solar maximum, which raises a question: is something wrong with the solar cycle? Is the sun going haywire?

"Nothing's wrong," reassures Hathaway. The sun isn't about to explode, nor is the sunspot cycle broken.

"These latest sunspots were whoppers," he allows, "but sunspot counts averaged over many weeks are still declining as predicted. We're still on course for a solar minimum in 2006."

Indeed, it's possible that what we've just experienced is a normal part of the solar cycle, speculates Hathaway.

"There's a curious tendency for the biggest flares to occur after solar maximum - on the downslope toward solar minimum. This has happened during two of the last three solar cycles." The plot below illustrates his point.

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/solarscience-04r.html