Seeing visible light flashes in the scintillator was one of oldest ways how we observed ionizing radiation. It's more then 100 years old method.

"This built upon the work of earlier researchers such as Antoine Henri Becquerel, who discovered radioactivity whilst working on the phosphorescence of uranium salts in 1896. Previously, scintillation events had to be laboriously detected by eye, using a spinthariscope (a simple microscope) to observe light flashes in the scintillator."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillation_counter

Also the sobering footage taken by this YouTuber by sending a GoPro through a particle accelerator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uf4Ux4SlyT4

Can anyone tell whether these exposures occurred through the camera lens (from fallout particles in the sky of the depicted scenes) or in post- (or pre-) exposure handling of the film from hot dust carried by the photographer?

thank you so much for this link! I have been trying to search for footage of this phenomenon (in the pre-llm era) 10+y ago

The corona monitoring satellite cameras "blink" on incoming xray flares.

The blog link describes the cleanup process.

They take two pictures, each taking up half the total observation period. If you subtract the two images, the deltas should be the cosmic ray flashes. You can then subtract those out. They use two pictures as opposed to more to minimize the impact of readout noise.

To deal with "stuck pixel" type errors, they can slightly shift the camera between the two observations. They can counter act the shift before doing the initial subtraction.

One way is to take a “blank” picture which will then show just the noise; then use that as a reference for what can be removed from the image.

its actually quite doable. any cosmic rays will not be present in two pictures in a row. any permanent damage will be exactly the same in all pictures.

photoshop ;D, or using multiple pictures

Coronal mass traveling at a higher speed "sweeps" what's before it. You can see the spiral shape, and you can probably figure out that the stuff is slowing down as it moves outward.

Watch this occasionally for a few months and you'll get the idea, although solar activity is slowing down somewhat (as expected).

https://www.spaceweather.gov/products/wsa-enlil-solar-wind-p...

If you carefully re-read what GP wrote, you'll see there's no reference to Earth's orbit or 1 AU in there. GP wrote about the solar wind scattering cosmic rays when it reached some point in its outward travel.

I think what I explained is known by anyone in solar physics. I cannot believe they would not have discussed it. It's absence in the paper is weird. But I think unpredictable refers more to LEO in the context of the paper where things are indeed more dynamic that just the 11 year periodicity of cosmic rays from solar activity causing scattering in the heliosphere.

Identifying a mechanism is not predicting its rate.

There may be another variable they’re trying to pin down.