Mama always told me not to look into the sights of the sun. Oh but mama that’s where the fun is. — Bruce Springsteen, Blinded by the Light.

“His job is simultaneously so obscure that most people have never heard of it and so important that virtually every sector of the economy depends on it. His official title, one shared by no more than a few dozen Americans, is space-weather forecaster. Ever since leaving the Air Force, Tegnell has worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center, in Boulder, Colorado: ten hours a day, forty hours a week, three decades spent staring at real-time images of the sun.” Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker: What a Major Solar Storm Could Do to Our Planet. “Disturbances on the sun may have the potential to devastate our power grid and communication systems. When the next big storm arrives, will we be prepared for it?”