If it was solar flares, you'd think we would have noticed after a week.
I, for one, welcome our new spotty faced sun overlords.
The mysterious shutdown and evacuation of a solar research laboratory, tucked away in a forest in New Mexico, USA, has sent the internet abuzz with a flurry of conspiracy theories. The Sunspot Solar Observatory (SSO), located in the Sacramento Mountains, was switched off earlier this month, and staff ordered to leave. The FBI …
There's an obvious explanation to all this,
Here's some drone footage of it closed,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7-Md5af9_4
They also shut down the local post office,
https://www.kvia.com/news/new-mexico/national-solar-observatory-usps-office-in-sunspot-nm-evacuated-for-safety-reasons-/792020771
So If I was to hazard a guess I would say Aliens have sent something in the post. Simple logic saves the day.
I guess some conspiracy nutjob who also moonlighting as mail bomber
That's what they want you to believe. They only closed the post office to make something nasty sent through the mail seem like a plausible reason for shutting down the lab.
When the solar observatory accidentally took a picture of the alien spacecraft, their leader on Earth had to act immediately, but fortunately he's dictator of the largest country on Earth and recently managed have a stooge installed as president of the United States. He can't afford to be discovered until his plan - in collusion cooperation with his stooge - to destroy America from within and throw the world into chaos is complete so the invasion can begin. I'll bet he can't help but laugh to himself over the irony of his stooge's tirades against illegal aliens. He even gave him the MAGA phrase, but he knows it really stands for Make Aliens Great Again!
I should watch it, I think QAnon started as a joke, too...someone somewhere is going to believe this shit!
A plausible scenario was that a small quantity of mercury was delivered by post for some maintenance work on the telescope mercury bearings. The package arrived with the container broken causing mild concern about the toxic mercury vapour and prompting an evacuation as a precaution till is was cleaned up and vented. The FBI was called as in the norm when toxic hazards arrive in the post.
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A well engineered mercury bearing only needs a surprisingly small amount of mercury. Even if it is quite large, you only need a tiny gap between the outer bowl and the thing floating in the bowl. When visiting lighthouses I've been surprised at how little mercury they use to float their lenses.
Because this is the only place in the US that has a lot of mercury in one place? Hardly. Hell, my high school science teacher had a big flask filled with the stuff. I'll bet a lot of older high schools have pounds of mercury sitting in a forgotten closet somewhere.
If you want some, and live in the US, buy it by the half pound and they'll ship it to your house:
https://www.sciencecompany.com/Mercury-Metal-quicksilver-3X-Distilled-12lb-P16388.aspx
But Cody's mercury wasn't turning red. And liberals fulminating against the new solar minima demanded the FBI close the centre until their climate jolly in SF was complete. One didn't get the memo and took a more literal and liberal approach to fulminate. It's a sensitive matter, said the FBI.
I always WONDERED why they used Mercury bearings when modern silicone oils (non-conductive) or something like Mobil SHC 527 Series hydraulic oil that resists high temperatures and high pressures can be bought by the barrel at a much reduced environmental cost versus Mercury!
Try the Mobil SHC 527 stuff for better safety and high-performance in your astrometric products!
https://www.mobil.com/en/industrial/Lubricants/Products/Mobil-SHC-527
You can also use MAGNETIC BEARINGS or FERRO-FLUID for damping purposes which Cadillac does for their MagneRide shocks on their high end CTS-V sports cars!
I always WONDERED why they used Mercury bearings
Maybe because the tiny group of engineers and specialists who build astronomical instruments are familiar with mercury, not the alternatives.
My division of an aerospace company loves metals, and it likes generous mid-range alloys like 6061 aluminum and precipitation hardened stainless steels (17-4, 15-5, etc.) When we recently needed a stronger, more fatigue-resistant aluminum alloy that led us to pick from the 7000 series, we had to learn partly by trial and error how to deal with its its forging, heat treating, and repair/rework behavior. It's been an expensive learning process figuring out an aerospace industry workhorse alloy because no one on the project has worked with it before.
If it hadn't been for a customer both willing to fund our learning curve and remain unyielding on over-the-top safety margins, we'd be back to 6061 in a heart beat.
So I can completely imagine some instrument maker faced with the tight budget of a grant-funded astronomy lab sticking to old, tried-and-true mercury solutions rather than trying to research and master replacement materials.
It isn't like the mercury used to float instruments / rooms / etc. leaks out into the environment, or is difficult to capture down the road when the facility is demo'ed.
Besides, if you want to worry about mercury getting into the environment you first need to shut down all coal burning power plants operating in the region, and clean up every fly ash dump. Before those are taken care of, worrying about "environment costs" from using mercury to float a telescope is ludicrous!
It's aliens, they are invading us as we speak. I have been fighting them for weeks, they are very small, their craft look like mosquitoes. I have been using a tennis racket to kill them but they keep sending more.
Bug spray helps to clog their engine intakes after a while they crash. They tried to talk to me by tellypathy I could hear tiny voicesin my head but I ignore them and kill them anyway.Don't be fooled if you see a mosquito it's an alien kill it.My cat told me they are from another galaxy where they have no food.
"I have been using a tennis racket to kill them but they keep sending more.
Bug spray helps to clog their engine intakes after a while they crash."
I've always said physics works better than chemistry for killing bug.. er I mean aliens. Hit 'em with a shoe, the tennis racket technique is full of large holes. Their chemists will eventually concoct an antidote to the bug spray.
I love the partisanship whenever Trump is insulted and the downvotes accrue. FFS people, get a sense of humour. He's only a politician (and newly minted at that), not the saviour of the human race. It's alight to insult or laugh at pols, even if you support them.
Have a pint and calm down
So given the list of things the FBI is primarily responsible for investigating:
Terrorism, Counter intelligence, Cyber crime, Public Corruption, Civil Rights, Organised Crime, White-collar crime, violent crime and WMDs then it seems fairly obvious why this site was shutdown.
Obviously this wasn't an "observatory" at all but a Solar collector weapon of mass destruction (possibly the work of the reverse vampires hired by the Rand corporation in conjunction with the saucer people)...
We are through the looking glass people.....
I have been observing the sun for years, and I have rarely seen the sun so quiet, even in Hydrogen alpha light. There were some nice prominences visible on the north-eastern limb yesterday, but otherwise all was quiet. in white light, it is just a dull disk, as my most recent solar image in white light shows. Things are little better in Calcium-K light.
I suspect it's something much more mundane, like someone running an unauthorized cryptocoin mining farm at the facility. Or there were some discrepancies in the budget which were traced to the observatory.
If it were aliens or state conspiracy I would expect military or NSA involvement. If the FBI is involved and there are no dead bodies and little local law enforcement involved, then it is probably money related.
> The National Solar Observatory's site enjoys a wide and largely unobstructed view of both the U.S. Air Force's Holloman Air Force Base and the U.S. Army's White Sands Missile Range, both of which regularly host a very wide array of U.S. military research and development programs.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23582/mysterious-evacuation-of-solar-observatory-overlooking-white-sands-smells-like-espionage
Holloman & WSMR do a LOT of extremely sensitive stuff.
But Apache Point Observatory and the other scopes a mile away are still open. And no one's been evacuated from the site, even though it's so close to the solar observatory. They also have an excellent view of WSMR and Holloman. For that matter, the "super scary helicopters" are pretty much normal for the area. I've seen lots of cool aircraft zooming by when I've been at APO.
Oh my, sorry dears, I was off doing something important. Yes, China. Yes, Aliens. Yes, imminent invasion and destruction (on a cosmic time scale anyway).
A small variation on 三体 - The Three Body Problem. The observatory noticed someone signalling the aliens.
You need to get out more and read world literature, for better perspective. And read more SciFi. It's all explained therein.
The kanji "三体" means "3 body" in JAPANESE, now sure kanji has a Chinese origin and therefore the same characters do have a Chinese meaning, "Trisomy" which is a chromosome disorder related to the development of down syndrome. Japanese and Chinese translations of characters are NOT equivalent.
It was Jenkins that first noticed them, impossible though they were, there on the surface of the sun - a cluster of geometric shapes beyond description, angular, faceted, rust coloured .. structures, they could be nothing else. For even as monumental towers of white hot plasma shifted, planet sized beside them, shunting energies sufficient to fry entire worlds down around them, there stubbornly they remained. That anything so solid should appear in that hell-scape held the lot of us spell bound for three days. No one wanted to leave, though on the second sleepless day, Davis's sister phoned to inquire if everything was quite all right. He put her off with a promise to send her the "most remarkable photograph anyone had ever seen". He would have done so the next day but that was when all reason was abandoned.
It had been standard practice to project the stellar image at times i upon a great round white table, 8 feet across, the better to observe fine detail with un-aided eye. At this point we had exhausted our limited supply of actual food and would have had to send someone into town that day anyway for provisions, and so were subsisting on liberal doses of black coffee. Though it was not customary, we had taken to parking our mugs on the projection table while staring transfixed at the structures there on the sun. That three of us should have been mesmerised by this scene should have beena clue perhaps. Finally Davis declared "enough" and, without further ado threw the switch to turn on the room lights. The span of a breath later, Jenkins made a stifled choking gasp, bolted up knocking over a mug in the process and ran out. Then i saw it, there in my own cup, on the surface of the black liquid, in miniature, that same geometry. And on the table, in the flat light of the projection, a third dimension slowly rising in the spilt coffee, impossible angles, a structure, and as one stared into it, yes of course,a passage of some kind..
Last I heard, Lietenant Expendable miscalculated the approach and they got a *very* clear shot of the NCC-1701 coming back around the Sun after their slingshot.
Fortunately because of the angle wrt Earth few if any people saw it.
The good news is that not half an hour later he "accidentally" got ejected into space while cleaning the plasma manifolds with a Q-tip (tm)
Either that or they saw the "Gotterdammerung" doing a flight test picking up some solar protons on the way, and harvesting the anti-matter and helium-3.
What was that film called where someone built a flying sphere in their shed using parts from a junkyard and what looked a bit like an Apple-2 ? also recall something about a faster than light drive.
Yup. I think they ended up using a car battery as a power source in the end because the size of the "bubble" turned out to be dependent on input voltage.
Interestingly it was said a few years back that someone vanished in mysterious circumstances after building and testing a device they found the plans for in an ancient handwritten folder in a library round here. The story told of a strange high pitched whining noise and a lot of radio/TV interference followed by random windows cracking for miles around. The authorities turned up and found "something strange" in an abandoned greenhouse roughly central to the effect and thats the last we heard of it at least officially because it all got hushed up.
Perhaps the movie was based on elements of real life incidents?
My own experiments suggest that there may be ways to generate a field but not using a car battery, you'd need a reliable source of positrons and a containment field with about the same strength as a medical MR scanner most likely using superconducting coils plus a few other parts you "can't just buy at Radio Shack"... and some LN2 or at the very least dry ice/NPS assuming the coils can be made to superconduct at more than 221K somehow or perhaps using tuned IR lasers aimed at the coils to keep them superconducting with only moderate cooling?
Liquid helium is... problematical.
Funny how they always assume that only their own country is capable of spotting $whatever and so their own TLAs can easily cover it up. Or that every other government in the world will also cover it up if their people see/find $whatever. Or there's a shadowy world government that's really in charge.
The reality, obviously, is that there are other solar observatories completely independent of the US systems and they have announced the impending doom of the human race. Only the US citizenry is unaware of it. The rest of us are rampage, pillaging and looting. it's all a plan to piss off the survivalists. They're missing out out on their life's dream event.
That's not really true, schizophrenics all over the world have delusions about the CIA and FBI being after them or involved in some conspiracy. The CIA and FBI have nice and easy sounding names, and the US exports a lot of culture in the forms of TV shows, Movies ,ect which makes these ideas prevalent globally.