In the autumn of 1859, the Earth was hit by a massive coronal ejection from the Sun.
Aurora flared worldwide, compasses went wild and the telegraph system crashed.
This is the pivoting event in Stuart Clark's book "The Sun Kings" - Princeton University Press, ISBN-13:978-0-691-12660-9
The book is centered around the life and work of Richard Carrington, amateur astronomer and member of the Royal Society and Royal Astronomical Society.
There are flashbacks and side trips, covering mainly English astronomy, Hershcel through to Maunder, with some discussion of events in Germany and the US.
The English story is fairly detailed, but choppy, I think as a matter of stylistic choice, the accounts of the actitivies on the Continent and in the US are more terse. This is probably a matter of sourcing, Clark presumably had ready access to RAS and RS archives, but to a lesser extent in the US and Germany.
The story straddles the onset of the modern area of astronomy, with photography and spectroscopy developed as critical tools during the tale; the focus is on the slow understanding of Solar physics, and the "Sun-Earth connection" in modern language.
There was quite a lot of detail there I had not known, and some of the characters were brought to life.
I found the style a bit breathless, slightly hyped at times, but it probably makes for more interesting reading for most audiences.
The book touches on the issue of the role of the Sun in climate variability, both as a motive for the research and as a consequence of the increased understanding. The final chapter highlight the Friis-Christensen and Svensmark claims of the role of high altitude clouds, and the conjecture that the cloud coverage is affected by cosmic ray seeding, which in turn is affected by the strength of the solar magnetosphere. In particular that the clouds contribute significantly to albedo changes and hence mean surface temperatures. Clark notes the claim that this effect may be comparable to current anthropic warming.
That chapter was a bit annoying - it hinted at endorsement of the concept, with suitable level of caveats, but with too little detail to evaluate the claim, or the rebuttals from the climate community.
Raising the issue, the author really owed the reader a more comprehensive discussion.
The book is a good read for anyone interested in the history of modern science and a little bit of glimmer to the "sausage factory" side of the actual doing of science. It is a little light for professional scientists and I wish it had been fleshed out a bit more.
Anyone involved in solar research knows the names of Maunder and Carrington for the Maunder minimum and Carrington rotations, respectively. I started my undergraduate career at Indiana University as a astrophysics major and worked on a cosmic ray experiment (using scintillating secondary muon telescopes) under Prof. Rick van Kooten. Anyway, I worked on the solar variation part of our cosmic ray flux and of course, focused on the latter of the two names mentioned above. Very cool stuff, indeed, and SOHO has always been a great source of data.