SOLAR MAX

Friday, December 29, 2000
By CHARLES WARD
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

The sun.
We gawk at the colors it paints on hillsides at sunrise.

We soak in its warmth in the summer months. At the height of winter's seasonal affective disorder, we curse its absence

By the end of "Solarmax," the new Imax film opening Tuesday at the Pacific Science Center, awe and terror may trump all the other emotions we feel about the star at the center of our solar system.

Seen in stunning pictures from outer space, the pulsing, red-orange gaseous sphere is utterly mesmerizing on the giant screen. Yet, the narrator tells us, the sun's threat to Earth is equally frightening.

The title for John Weiley's sumptuous film is shorthand for solar maximum, when some of the sun's most violent storms occur.

Every 11 years or so, the sun switches poles, or polarity. That jolt increases the torrents of energy the sun sends toward Earth. Those electromagnetic onslaughts have fried electric transformers, destroyed spy satellites, killed cellular phone service -- and made it hard for pigeons to fly. (They use the Earth's magnetic field to navigate.)

"Solarmax" arrives just as the sun is at the climax of the current solar cycle. The next several months could bring the biggest threat yet to all the gizmos man has invented.

One is SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory that provided many of the breathtaking pictures in "Solarmax." Orbiting the sun nearly a million miles closer than Earth, it feeds scientists endless streams of data about the star. Producers of "Solarmax" got one month's worth.

Yet, "Solarmax" can deflate our smugness about such scientific achievements. Weiley's crews take us to Ireland and Peru, where ancient civilizations mastered the sun's cycle of birth and death and built monuments to capture the exact moment of the winter solstice.

Too, the film's quick-hit historical survey notes how astronomers in ancient Babylon made observations so accurate that modern-day scientists still check computer programs against them.

But ever since the Irish created their shrine 5,300 years ago, people have been deeply ambivalent about the sun. Knowing its power but not being able to explain it, they have made it the center of religions and political systems. The Japanese emperor still prays to the goddess of the sun at the winter and summer solstices.

"Solarmax" is not elegant. It can soar lyrically and move with staccato briskness. Occasionally, it can nearly stall, as it does when Weiley tries to dramatize how scientists, evidently not consulting those Babylonians, accidentally turned SOHO off and then spent months guessing how to turn it back on.

Still, on the giant screen, the images of sunspots, flares hurtling out of the corona and the bubbling surface infect the mind. Helping that is the orchestral and choral music by Australian Nigel Westlake (which NBC used during its Summer Olympics telecasts).

"Solarmax" is so stimulating that, for a few moments at least, you won't notice the sun's absence when you leave the theater.

source: seattlepi.nwsource.com