This afternoon, an extremely powerful solar flame was seen on the sun. The UV- and rontgen-radiation released is the most intense ever measured. The 'stream' is on its way to earth at 1000km / s, and should reach us on Wednesday or Thursday.

The radiation won't be harmful for us (most of it will be absorbed by the atmosphere), but satellites that happen to be in its way will suffer from it. Passengers on plane flights might be subject to radiation as powerfull as an x-ray at the doctor's.

Radiocommunication, GPS and cellphones may be affected by this.

And since the particles will be absorbed by the atmoshpere, we'll get to see a lot of northern light!

NASA put some SOHO satellite-streams on its site, but the server is either overloaded or just extremely slow. I put the last images from SOHO on my server (2.85MB, mpeg).