That one Tuesday last March when my satellite photos got wrecked by sun flares

I was tracking this weird geometric pattern near the Nevada test site, and for a whole week every single image came out with these crazy streaks. Turned out there was a big solar flare that week that nobody in the forums warned about. I wasted like 40 hours staring at blurry nonsense thinking I found something. Has anyone else had a whole data set ruined by space weather like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

riley_miller2522d ago

Wait, so you're saying I could've avoided three late nights hunched over snow-streak screenshots with a free alert tool? That's like telling a kid who forgot his lunch you can just buy food at school - obvious in hindsight but devastating in the moment. I definitely had that "I found a secret base!" rush for a solid 48 hours before I googled "white lines on satellite images 2024" and felt about two inches tall. So yeah, my bad for not checking space weather before getting my tinfoil hat ready. At least we both learned the hard way that the sun has no respect for conspiracy theories.

scott.jana19d ago

Keep in mind that solar flares aren't actually that predictable day to day, @grantf73 - the sun's cycle gives you a general idea of activity levels but specific flares only show up about 8 minutes after they happen. Even the free alert tools can't tell you a flare is coming, just that one just hit. So yeah, the data got wrecked for that week unless you want to try to subtract the streak noise manually.

grantf7322d ago

...and honestly it sounds like you just need better planning. Solar activity is pretty predictable at a basic level, we know the sun goes through cycles. If you're spending 40 hours on satellite data without checking if there's a flare happening, that's kinda on you. There are free tools that give you real-time alerts for this stuff. Not saying it's not annoying when it happens, but calling it "wrecked" feels dramatic. The data still exists, you just picked a bad week.