An astronomer's private view
On the morning of September 1, 1859, Richard Carrington, a wealthy amateur astronomer, was in his private observatory in Redhill, Surrey. He was projecting an image of the sun through his telescope and sketching a large group of sunspots when he saw something unprecedented. At 11:18 AM, he witnessed two "patches of intensely bright and white light" suddenly erupt from the sunspot group. The event was so brilliant he initially thought there was a hole in his viewing screen letting daylight through. Realizing he was observing a solar phenomenon, he ran to find someone to witness it with him, but when he returned 60 seconds later, the lights were already fading. The entire observation lasted only five minutes. Another English astronomer, Richard Hodgson, independently recorded the same event, confirming it was not an instrumental error. This was the first time in history a solar flare had been observed and documented.
The eruption Carrington saw was a white-light flare, a particularly rare and energetic type. Modern analysis estimates its X-ray classification was around X45, making it one of the most powerful flares ever recorded. The flare hurled a colossal cloud of magnetized plasma, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), directly at Earth. This CME traveled the 93 million miles (150 million km) from the Sun to Earth in a record 17.6 hours; a trip that typically takes several days. Carrington suspected a link between the solar event and subsequent terrestrial disturbances, an important for the field of space weather.