Vitruvius once mentioned in his book that harmony was a difficult and challenging field of music, especially for those unfamiliar with Greek books. To explain it, one had no choice but to use Greek.
Pomona decided she would learn Greek after learning French, but before that, she had to prepare for Halloween, the wizarding New Year.
As she worked, she thought of the story Sinistra had told her. On September 1, 1859, a Muggle astronomer named Richard Carrington was drawing sunspot maps in his private observatory. To reduce the Sun's blinding brightness, he filtered its image through his telescope. Then, two brilliant points of light appeared within a cluster of sunspots.
At first, Carrington thought there was a gap in his filtering apparatus that allowed all the sunlight through. But the points grew brighter and brighter, and within minutes, the needles at observatories around the world began to dance wildly.
He had not yet realized that he had become the first person to observe a solar flare. That same day, an eerie red glow illuminated everywhere, including the Caribbean Sea. White ribbons of light danced in the sky, as though people were seeing the aurora.
Under such light, people could read without even turning on a lamp. Animals had their days and nights reversed by the mysterious glow, and skylarks chirped noisily through the early morning. If humans so much as touched a telegraph machine, they would be shocked and burned for no reason.
Solar flares on that scale were rare, but that did not mean another would not occur. Their effects were difficult to predict. After all, when the Sun "sneezed," the Earth was also revolving; by the time the solar wind arrived, the Earth might have moved out of the way.
It was entirely a matter of probability.