ABSTRACT
On September 1, 1859, British scientist Richard Carrington went to work in his private observatory just as he did every morning. His current project was recording the strange sunspots that covered the face of the sun. That morning he was doing his usual work, drawing the sunspots he saw projected onto a screen. Then suddenly, two brilliant beads of blinding white light appeared over the sunspots. He observed the phenomena for 5 minutes as the bright light contracted and finally disappeared. That night, the midnight skies came alive with blazing red and orange lights. The sky was so bright that workers got out of bed thinking that it was morning. Birds began singing, fooled into thinking the sun had risen. A study of ice core samples shows that the Carrington Event was the largest solar storm in the last 500 years.
