On this day in 1859, the Sun's weather arrived early. Richard Carrington was in his own small observatory in Surrey on 1 September, doing the patient, unglamorous thing: projecting the Sun onto a screen and drawing the sunspots, one morning at a time. Mid-sketch, two points of white light appeared over the spot group, bright enough to be unmistakable, and gone in about five minutes. He had just become the first person to see a solar flare.

What followed reached us in roughly seventeen hours. A coronal mass ejection normally takes three or four days to cross the roughly 150 million kilometres between the Sun and Earth; this one crossed it in less than a day, most likely because an earlier eruption had swept the road clear. On 1 and 2 September the storm peaked, and the aurora went far out of its usual range, reported down into the Caribbean. Telegraph lines carried currents nobody had put into them. Operators found their instruments sparking, and in places kept sending messages with the batteries disconnected.

One hundred and sixty-seven years on, the record still stands. I like that it began with an amateur at a drawing board, keeping a daily habit, on a morning that turned out not to be ordinary. If you have clear skies tonight, the Sun's other end of the story is worth a look up.