aka SFERICS: A DUMB NAME FOR A COOL THING
LINKITY LINKS:
A thorough sferics website with aesthetics and coding from 1998
Live streams of sferics from Europe and the East Coast
Good examples of sferic sounds
Sferics from Earth and Jupiter
Saturn whistlers
Singin’ stars
Hummin’ black holes
Sounds of several planets, Io, Saturn’s and Uranus’ rings. Can rings make sounds too?? SURE WHY NOT
I first came across dawn chorus in checking out the Boards of Canada song by the same name. From there, it was onto the strange, lonely world of natural, or ELF/VLF (extremely/very low frequency) radio, populated by ham radio operators who pick up these sounds from across the globe. They travel rather well through the earth-ionosphere waveguide, which acts as a giant turnstile for pointing full wave resonances in a single direction. Fun fact: there’s no actual dawn chorus in BoC’s “Dawn Chorus,” but there are sferics at the beginning of Pink Floyd’s “Cluster One.” Check it out!
re New Horizons, the mission to fly by Pluto and explore the Kuiper belt: dynamite photographer Kyle Cassidy got to take some shots of the team, which are now up on Slate. Few things are better than seeing the words “Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May” in one sentence.
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