I’ve just spent an incredible 18-hour day filming sequences for a documentary that will air on National Geographic television in 2010.  The programme will be called Storm Worlds and I will be in the episode that talks about solar storms.  The producers called me because they had read The Sun Kings and wanted to recreate the incredible solar storm and subsequent aurora of 1859 in an engaging and informative way.

I was flown to Toronto where Yap Films are based and taken to a restored 19th century railway station and telegraph office for the filming.  I’m promised that computer graphics will bring alive the electrical mayhem of the solar storm.  It was certainly a fun day – if exhausting.  A little bit of trivia is that the filming took the same length of time as the Carrington flare took to cross space from the Sun and hit the Earth.

A big ‘thank you’ to everyone at Yap, the director Kenny Scott and the crew for keeping the day fun.  Also a big ‘thank you’ to Tom Luton and Leslie Harvey from the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada who supplied the beautiful brass telescope for me to use.