Vancanneyt Sander Posted December 2, 2012 Share Posted December 2, 2012 Dear visitors of SpaceWeatherLive, 2012 was not the year of a solar maximum. It started active with the biggest flare recorded on March 7: X5.4. But the last months where mostly a disappointment with only small sunspots visible with almost no flare activity. The last M-flare happened on November 28th with a strength of M2.25. Nevertheless there where some nice geomagnetic disturbances with K-indices equal or higher then 7. Middle latitude skywatchers could view some aurora in 2012 with the best storm on july 14th when a remarkable 36-hour event occurred with a maximum Kp index of 8; the US got the nicest show with Aurora as far south as Iowa, Washington, ... . Middle latitude Aurora watchers in Europe did miss the whole show. 2013 should be the year of solar maximum, so we'll have some interesting times ahead! This year the SpaceWeatherLive websites received many new visitors from all over the world to follow the Space Weather events live on our websites and to receive our alerts. Our visitor count rose with the solar activity and we needed to invest in a separate server environment to keep the website online during solar storms. This didn't go too well as we where a few times offline due to the massive amount of visitors after a CME impact. Since the outages in the beginning of 2012 we optimized our site to make it more quickly and more lightly so we could handle more visitors but that wasn't enough and now we had to invest in a server with a bit more power so we can keep the site online during Solar Max. The past year our international visitor count rose with more then 150% with many new visitors from the US, Canada, France, Germany and many more. Our website already has 4 localized versions and we can expand this to many more (if you'd like to help us translate, contact us!). We would also like to thank all the people who donated to our Project and to the advertisers; thanks to you we could invest in a new server that will keep us online during the upcoming solar max. We need your continued support in 2013 to keep you guys alerted when Space Weather happens. SpaceWeatherLive is a part of a non-profit association called "Astro Event Group vzw" from Belgium (Europe) for everyone that is interested in astronomy for all the Dutch speaking visitors. SpaceWeatherLive originated from Poollicht.be; the Flemish variant of the site. It expanded in 2005 with the international site as you know it now. If you would like to volunteer one our website, keep users up to date on the forum or promote our international SpaceWeatherLive website, don't hesitate to help us out! Thanks to everyone who supported! The SpaceWeatherLive Team Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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