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James Van Allen

James Alfred Van Allen (September 7, 1914 – August 9, 2006) was an American space physicist at the University of Iowa. He was instrumental in establishing the field of magnetospheric research in space.

The Van Allen radiation belts were named after him, following his discovery using Geiger–Müller tube instruments on the 1958 satellites (Explorer 1, Explorer 3, and Pioneer 3)  during the International Geophysical Year. Van Allen led the scientific community in putting scientific research instruments on space satellites.

Early years and education
James Van Allen was born on September 7, 1914, on a small farm near Mount Pleasant, Iowa. As a child, he was fascinated by mechanical and electrical devices and was an avid reader of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines. He once horrified his mother by constructing a Tesla coil that produced foot-long sparks and caused his hair to stand on end.

A fellowship allowed him to continue studying nuclear physics at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., where he also became immersed in research in geomagnetism, cosmic rays, auroral physics and the physics of Earth's upper atmosphere.

World War II
In August 1939, Van Allen joined the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. as a Carnegie Research Fellow. In the summer of 1940, he joined DTM's national defense efforts with his appointment to a staff position in Section T with the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) in Washington, D.C., where he worked on the development of photoelectric and radio proximity fuzes, which are detonators that increase the effectiveness of anti-aircraft fire. Another NDRC project later became the atomic bomb Manhattan Project in 1941. With the outbreak of World War II, the proximity fuze work was transferred to the newly created Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) of Johns Hopkins University in April 1942. He worked on improving the ruggedness of vacuum tubes subject to the vibration from a gun battery. The work at APL resulted in a new generation of radio-proximity fuses for anti-aircraft defense of ships and for shore bombardment.

Van Allen was commissioned as a U.S. Navy lieutenant in November 1942 and served for 16 months on a succession of South Pacific Fleet destroyers, instructing gunnery officers and conducting tests on his artillery fuses. He was an assistant staff gunnery officer on the battleship USS Washington when the ship successfully defended itself against a Japanese kamikaze attack during the Battle of the Philippine Sea, (June 19–20, 1944). For his actions at the Pacific, Van Allen was awarded four battle stars. He was promoted to lieutenant commander in 1946. "My service as a naval officer was, far and away, the most broadening experience of my lifetime," he wrote in a 1990 autobiographical essay.

1946–1954 Aerobee and Rockoon
Discharged from the Navy in 1946, Van Allen returned to civilian research at APL. He organized and directed a team at Johns Hopkins University to conduct high-altitude experiments, using V-2 rockets captured from the Germans at the end of World War II. Van Allen decided a small sounding rocket was needed for upper atmosphere research. The Aerojet WAC Corporal and the Bumblebee missile were developed under a US Navy program. He drew specifications for the Aerobee sounding rocket and headed the committee that convinced the U.S. government to produce it. The first instrument-carrying Aerobee was the A-5, launched on March 5, 1948, from White Sands, New Mexico, carrying instruments for cosmic radiation research, reaching an altitude of 117.5 km.

Van Allen was elected chairman of the V-2 Upper Atmosphere Panel on December 29, 1947. The panel was renamed Upper Atmosphere Rocket Research Panel on March 18, 1948; then Rocket and Satellite Research Panel on April 29, 1948. The panel suspended operations on May 19, 1960, and had a reunion on February 2, 1968.

Cmdr. Lee Lewis, Cmdr. G. Halvorson, S.F. Singer, and James A. Van Allen developed the idea for the Rockoon on March 1, 1949, during the Aerobee rocket firing cruise on the research vessel USS Norton Sound.

On April 5, 1950, Van Allen left the Applied Physics Laboratory, to accept a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation research fellowship at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. The following year (1951) Van Allen accepted the position as head of the physics department at the University of Iowa. Before long, he was enlisting students in his efforts to discover the secrets of the wild blue yonder and inventing ways to carry instruments higher into the atmosphere than ever before. By 1952, Van Allen was the first to devise a balloon-rocket combination that lifted rockets on balloons high above most of the Earth's atmosphere before firing them even higher. The rockets were ignited after the balloons reached an altitude of 16 kilometers.

As Time magazine later reported, "Van Allen’s ‘Rockoons’ could not be fired in Iowa for fear that the spent rockets would strike an Iowan or his house." So Van Allen convinced the U.S. Coast Guard to let him fire his Rockoons from the icebreaker Eastwind that was bound for Greenland. "The first balloon rose properly to 70,000 ft., but the rocket hanging under it did not fire. The second Rockoon behaved in the same maddening way. On the theory that extreme cold at high altitude might have stopped the clockwork supposed to ignite the rockets, Van Allen heated cans of orange juice, smuggled them into the third Rockoon’s gondola, and wrapped the whole business in insulation. The rocket fired."

In 1953, the Rockoons and their science payloads fired off Newfoundland detected the first hint of radiation belts surrounding Earth. The low-cost Rockoon technique was later used by the Office of Naval Research and The University of Iowa research groups in 1953–1955 and 1957, from ships at sea between Boston and Thule, Greenland.

In 1954, in a private discussion about the Redstone project with Ernst Stuhlinger, Wernher von Braun expressed his belief that they should have a "real, honest-to-goodness scientist" involved in their little unofficial satellite project. Stuhlinger followed up with a visit to Van Allen at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, where Van Allen was on sabbatical leave from Iowa to work on stellarator design. Van Allen later recounted, "Stuhlinger’s 1954 message was simple and eloquent. By virtue of ballistic missile developments at Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA), it was realistic to expect that within a year or two a small scientific satellite could be propelled into a durable orbit around the earth (Project Orbiter).... I expressed a keen interest in performing a worldwide survey of the cosmic-ray intensity above the atmosphere."

International Geophysical Year 1957–58

"In 1950 an event occurred that began small but was to affect the future of Van Allen and all his countrymen. In March, British Physicist Sydney Chapman dropped in on Van Allen [and] remarked that he would like to meet other scientists in the Washington area. Van Allen got on the phone, soon gathered eight or ten top scientists (Lloyd Berkner, S. Fred Singer, and Harry Vestine) in the living room of his small brick house. ‘It was what you might call a pedigreed bull session,’ he says.... The talk turned to geophysics and the two ‘International Polar Years’ that had enlisted the world’s leading nations to study the Arctic and Antarctic regions in 1882 and 1932. Someone suggested that with the development of new tools such as rockets, radar and computers, the time was ripe for a worldwide geophysical year. The other men were enthusiastic, and their enthusiasm spread around the world from Washington DC. From this meeting Lloyd Berkner and other participants proposed to the International Council of Scientific Unions that an IGY be planned for 1957–58 (during the maximum solar activity).... The International Geophysical Year (1957–58) stimulated the U.S. Government to promise earth satellites as geophysical tools. The Soviet government countered by rushing its Sputniks into orbit. The race into space or Space Race may be said to have started in Van Allen’s living room that evening in 1950."

In 1955, the U.S. announced Project Vanguard as part of the US contribution to the International Geophysical Year. Vanguard planned to launch an artificial satellite into an orbit around the Earth. It was to be run by the US Navy and developed from sounding rockets, which had the advantage of being primarily used for non-military scientific experiments.

A symposium on "The Scientific Uses of Earth Satellites" was held on January 26 and 27, 1956 at the University of Michigan under sponsorship of the Upper Atmosphere Rocket Research Panel, chaired by Dr. Van Allen. 33 scientific proposals were presented for inclusion in the IGY satellites. Van Allen's presentation highlighted the use of satellites for continuing cosmic-ray investigations. At this same time his Iowa Group began preparations for scientific research instruments to be carried by 'Rockoons' and Vanguard for the International Geophysical Year. Through "preparedness and good fortune," as he later wrote, those scientific instruments were available for incorporation in the 1958 Explorer and Pioneer IGY launches.

 * July 1, 1957: The International Geophysical Year begins. IGY is carried out by the International Council of Scientific Unions, over an 18-month period selected to match the period of maximum solar activity (e.g. sunspots). Lloyd Berkner, one of the scientists at the April 5, 1950, Silver Spring, Maryland meeting in Van Allen's home, serves as president of the ICSU from 1957 to 1959.
 * September 26, 1957: Thirty-six Rockoons (balloon-launched rockets) were launched from Navy icebreaker USS Glacier in Atlantic, Pacific, and Antarctic areas ranging from 75° N. to 72° S. latitude, as part of the U.S. International Geophysical Year scientific program headed by Van Allen and Lawrence J. Cahill of The University of Iowa. These were the first known upper atmosphere rocket soundings in the Antarctic area. Launched from IGY Rockoon Launch Site 2, Atlantic Ocean; Latitude: 0.83° N, Longitude: 0.99° W.
 * October 4, 1957: The Soviet Union (USSR) successfully launches Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite, as part of their participation in the IGY.
 * January 31, 1958: The first American satellite, Explorer 1, was launched into Earth orbit on a Juno I four-stage booster rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Aboard Explorer 1 were a micrometeorite detector and a cosmic ray experiment designed by Van Allen and his graduate students, with the satellite deployment of the sensor package supervised by Ernst Stuhlinger, who also had an expert cosmic ray background. Data from Explorer 1 and Explorer 3 (launched March 26, 1958) were used by the Iowa group to make "the first space-age scientific discovery": "the existence of a doughnut-shaped region of charged particle radiation trapped by the Earth’s magnetic field".
 * July 29, 1958: United States Congress passed the National Aeronautics and Space Act (commonly called the "Space Act"), which created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as of October 1, 1958, from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and other government agencies.
 * December 6, 1958: Pioneer 3, the third intended U.S. International Geophysical Year probe under the direction of NASA with the Army acting as executive agent, was launched from the Atlantic Missile Range by a Juno II rocket. The primary objective of the flight, to place the 12.95 pound (5.87 kg) scientific payload in the vicinity of the Moon, failed. Pioneer III did reach an altitude of 63,000 miles (101 000 km), providing Van Allen additional data that led to discovery of a second radiation belt. Trapped radiation starts at an altitude of several hundred miles from Earth and extends for several thousand miles into space. The Van Allen radiation belts are named after Van Allen, their discoverer.

Pioneer of space science and exploration
The May 4, 1959, issue of Time magazine credited James Van Allen as the man most responsible for giving the U.S. "a big lead in scientific achievement." They called Van Allen "a key figure in the cold war’s competition for prestige. .... Today he can tip back his head and look at the sky. Beyond its outermost blue are the world-encompassing belts of fierce radiation that bear his name. No human name has ever been given to a more majestic feature of the planet Earth."

James Van Allen, his colleagues, associates and students at The University of Iowa continued to fly scientific instruments on sounding rockets, Earth satellites (Explorer 52 / Hawkeye 1), and interplanetary spacecraft including the first missions (Pioneer program, Mariner program, Voyager program, Galileo spacecraft) to the planets Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Their discoveries contributed important segments to the world's knowledge of energetic particles, plasmas and radio waves throughout the Solar System.

Van Allen was the principal investigator for scientific investigations on 24 Earth satellites and planetary missions.

Professor emeritus
Van Allen stepped down as the head of the department of physics and astronomy in 1985, but continued working at the University of Iowa as the Carver Professor of Physics, emeritus. On October 9, 2004, the University of Iowa and the UI Alumni Association hosted a celebration to honor Van Allen and his many accomplishments, and in recognition of his 90th birthday. Activities included an invited lecture series, a public lecture followed by a cake and punch reception, and an evening banquet with many of his former colleagues and students in attendance. In August 2005, an elementary school bearing his name opened in North Liberty, Iowa. There is also a Van Allen elementary school in Escalon, CA.

In 2009, Van Allen's boyhood home in Mt. Pleasant, once maintained as a museum, was slated to be demolished. The new owner, Lee Pennebaker, chose not to demolish the home. It was donated to the Henry County Heritage Trust, which plans to move the house next to the old Saunders School which will be the home of the Henry County museum.

Personal life and death
Van Allen's wife of 61 years was Abigail Fithian Halsey II of Cincinnati (1922–2008). They met at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) during World War II. They were married October 13, 1945, in Southampton, Long Island. Their five children are Cynthia, Margot, Sarah, Thomas, and Peter.

On August 9, 2006, James Van Allen died at University Hospitals in Iowa City from heart failure.

Professor Van Allen and his wife Abigail are buried in Southampton, New York, where Mrs. Van Allen was born and the couple were married.

Abigail M. Foerstner wrote a biography James van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles, published by University of Iowa Press in 2007 with a paperback edition in 2009.

Legacy and honors

 * Elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences (1959)
 * Time magazine Man of the Year in 1960
 * Elliott Cresson Medal in 1961
 * Elected to the American Philosophical Society (1961)
 * Iowa Award in 1961
 * Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1964)
 * Distinguished Fellow, Iowa Academy of Science in 1975
 * Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1978
 * National Medal of Science in 1987
 * Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1988
 * Crafoord Prize in 1989
 * Vannevar Bush Award in 1991
 * NASA's Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994
 * National Air and Space Museum Trophy in 2006
 * Van Allen Probes (NASA mission, renamed from the Radiation Belt Storm Probes) in 2012

Van Allen Probes mission

The Van Allen Probes, initially the Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP), were renamed in 2012 in honor of Dr. Van Allen. Managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and implemented by the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at Johns Hopkins University, the mission was a part of the Living With a Star program. Designed for a two-year primary mission, the probes exceeded expectations by operating for seven years, demonstrating significant resilience against radiation in Earth's belts.

In collaboration with the Balloon Array for RBSP Relativistic Electron Losses (BARREL), the probes studied particles from the belts reaching Earth's atmosphere. Launched on August 30, 2012, aboard an Atlas V 401 rocket contracted to United Launch Alliance (ULA), the mission was initially delayed due to weather and Hurricane Isaac.

The mission concluded with the deactivation of Van Allen Probe B in July 2019 and Probe A in October 2019, following the lowering of their orbits to facilitate atmospheric reentry by 2034 as a measure against orbital debris.

The Van Allen Probes significantly advanced the understanding of space weather and its impact on Earth. Key discoveries included the dynamics of the Van Allen radiation belts and the role of solar activity in influencing space weather. The mission's findings highlighted how these radiation belts swell and shrink over time, responding to solar eruptions and impacting terrestrial phenomena like auroras, satellite functionality, power grids, and GPS communications.

A notable discovery in February 2013 was the transient appearance of a third Van Allen Radiation Belt, which lasted a few weeks and provided new insights into the belts' structure and dynamics. The probes also revealed the long-term behavior of Earth's ring current, a major component of the magnetosphere. Findings indicated a persistent, substantial ring current around Earth even during non-storm times, carried by high-energy protons. During geomagnetic storms, the enhancement of the ring current was shown to be due to low-energy protons entering the near-Earth region, challenging previous understandings.

NASA BARREL mission

Eighty years after the Second Byrd Expedition, the Balloon Array for RBSP Relativistic Electron Losses (BARREL), a NASA mission began to study Earth's Van Allen radiation belts at the Antarctic (South Pole) managed by Dartmouth College. BARREL launched 20 balloons from Antarctica during each of two balloon campaigns in January–February 2013 and December 2013 – February 2014. This scientific data will complement the Van Allen Probes data over the two-year mission.

title: James Van Allen


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Talk:Kara-Khanid Khanate

Language
Last talking language of Kara-Khanid's is persian and someones steal history here and this page is protected. That's weird. Their main language was Middle-Turkic and arabic not persian. Somone is trying to convert this page to tottaly Persian why there is persion on the top like they talking persian? this page should be edit definitely Ltequila (talk)ltequila —Preceding undated comment added 21:03, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
 * * cough*battleground comments*cough* --Kansas Bear (talk) 15:13, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

 * Nonsense, the source in the article state that they also spoke Persian. And the article has been protected so the likes of you can't disrupt it, as you have done previously in other places . --HistoryofIran (talk) 12:03, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

Researchers
I have no idea why someone would add list of researchers' names to the articles. If important, their name would appear in the sources. If not, then their names shouldn't appear, and it would be original research to suggest that they are important. Other articles on empires simply don't list the researchers' names in separate section, and the same is true for any other Wikipedia articles (e.g. a scientific topic, a historical event, a place, etc.). Unless it is an article specifically about researchers on the Kara-Khanids, then their names should not be listed in article. You can add the names if they said certain things that you are quoting in a particular sentences, e.g. "According to xyz, the Kara-Khanids originated from ..." or "Xyz disputed the idea that the Kara-Khanids originated from ...", or if a particular researcher is very important, for example, making some important discoveries (in which case the person may even merit a separate paragraph on the discussion of their discoveries), otherwise the names shouldn't be given as separate entries in their own different section in article. Hzh (talk) 08:36, 22 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I agree with your opinion, but before deleting the text, you should have explained this action on the article's talk page. The main motivation for including this list in the article was that, unfortunately, there is currently a growing number of publications on the history of Central Asia, where the authors ignore previous researchers. I have been doing research on the history of the Karakhanids for over 20 years and this list comes from a well-reviewed academic bibliography. I realized that this list of researchers should be included in an article in a different format and I will move it to an article that provides reviews of research on Central Asia.Khorazmiy (talk). — Preceding undated comment added 10:14, 22 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I think you could include their works under "Further reading" or "sources". Beshogur (talk) 09:01, 23 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you, I will do that.Khorazmiy (talk). — Preceding undated comment added 11:58, 23 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I have reverted the edit as user:Khorazmiy also removed a Cambridge University Press source in the process. Also, just wondering; why should we use Soviet and Russian Federation scholarship, when there are far better sources out there in English? (the world's lingua franca, and the language of this Wikipedia). - LouisAragon (talk) 23:43, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

 * Professor Dr. Boris Kochnev and Professor Dr. Elena Davidovich are high-level archaeologists and scholars. For many years they participated in the excavations of the cities of the Karakhanid era and studied the history of this state on the basis of coins that were not available to researchers from Western Europe. Based on their research, they defended their habilitation dissertations. If you are a specialist in the history of the Karakhanids, please give reasons why you do not think that the names of these worthy specialists should not be presented at least in the list of sources? I also would like to note that in the list of sources on the history of the Karakhanids there are publications in which the history of the Karakhanids is not covered at all and some of which I have deleted.Khorazmiy (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 04:58, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

Genetics
@Beshogur I don’t know how to source the the image from Vahaduo, like Vahaduo doesn’t post the dna distancing, you have to manually do it and screenshot or save the result. HazaraHistorian (talk) 21:08, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

 * @HazaraHistorian Are you using Vahaduo to do original research? —C.Fred (talk) 23:11, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

Edit-warring in infobox
, can you explain what you're doing? You've been reverted several times and you have made two reverts, and you've provided zero explanation throughout, despite some clear problems with your changes. Per WP:BRD, please explain your edits on the talk page instead of edit-warring. R Prazeres (talk) 09:32, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:Kara-Khanid Khanate


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Cavour

Cavour usually refers to Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour (1810–1861), Italian politician who was a leading figure in the unification of Italy and became Italy's first Prime Minister. It may also refer to eponymous places and ships, among others.

Argentina

 * Colonia Cavour, Argentina

Italy

 * Cavour, Piedmont
 * Cavour (Rome Metro)
 * Ponte Cavour, a bridge in Rome
 * Via Cavour (disambiguation), a street in Rome and Florence

United States

 * Cavour, South Dakota
 * Cavour, Wisconsin
 * Louis Cavour

Ships

 * Italian aircraft carrier Cavour (550)
 * Italian battleship Conte di Cavour

Other uses

 * Liceo classico Cavour, a school in Turin
 * Cavor, a character in the novel The First Men in the Moon

title: Cavour


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Finale (scorewriter)

Finale is a proprietary music notation software developed and released by MakeMusic for Microsoft Windows and macOS since 1988. In general, the operation of Finale bears some surface similarities to Adobe Photoshop.

Functionality
Finale's tools are organized into multiple hierarchically organized palettes, and the corresponding tool is selected to add or edit any particular class of score element. Voices are available in Finale as well. Several of Finale's tools provide an associated menu just to the left of the Help menu, available only when that particular tool is selected.

On the screen, Finale provides the ability to color code several elements of the score as a visual aid; on the print-out, all score elements are black (unless color print-out is explicitly chosen). With the corresponding tool selected, fine adjustment of each set of objects in a score is possible either by clicking and dragging or by entering measurements in a dialog box. A more generalized selection tool is also available to select large measure regions for editing key and time signatures or transposing, among other uses. This tool also provides the ability to reposition several classes of score objects directly, and more recent versions of the software have implemented extensive contextual meaning via this tool.

Finale automatically manages many of the basic rules of harmony and music notation, such as correct beaming, stem direction, vertical alignment of multiple rhythmic values, and established rules for positioning note heads on chords. In other situations, without advance user customization, the program makes what can be described as a good guess, especially in the area of enharmonic spelling of newly entered data generated from a MIDI keyboard, while respecting the current key signature.

Finale is capable of notating various music such as chorales or cut-out scores including new symbols invented by the composer. It has a built-in working guitar tablature system and includes a jazz font similar to that used in the Real Book. Nearly all elements in the score can be adjusted and moved.

Music can be entered using a keyboard or using the software itself. It also includes a function for optically recognising printed music from a scan. From Finale 2001 onward, the program included MicNotator, a module able to notate melodic pitches played on a single-pitch acoustic instrument via a microphone connected to the computer.

Finale 2004 introduced FinaleScript, a scripting language for the automation of repetitive tasks.

History
The first version of Finale was made by Phil Farrand and John Borowicz. They wrote the original version software for Coda Music Software, which was later sold to Net4Music and then became MakeMusic. After Finale version 3.7, Finale's marketers made the switch to years as identifiers for each new release, starting with Finale 97.

Finale 2004, released in early 2004, was the first release to run natively on Macintosh computers running Mac OS X Panther. This was considered a late release by MakeMusic, and full support for the features of Mac OS X was limited at first. More comprehensive support was brought "on-line" through maintenance releases going forward into 2004. Finale 2004 also continued to support PowerPC Macs running Mac OS 9. This release shortened the development cycle for Finale 2005, which was released the following August. While the number of new features in Finale '05 were necessarily limited, this was the first release to have both Windows and Mac versions on the same distribution CD.

Finale 2006 (released in the summer of 2005) included the Garritan Personal Orchestra, an integrated sound library. A limited-functionality music-scanning module, SmartScore Lite, was also included. Along with Page View and Scroll View, the 2006 release added StudioView, a display mode which is similar to Scroll View with the addition of a sequencer interface. This feature gave users an environment for creation, evaluation, and experimentation with different musical ideas in a multi-track environment. In StudioView, an additional staff appears above the notation, called TempoTap, allowing for complete control over tempo changes.

Finale 2007 was released with a "linked" score and part management system. A properly set-up "full score for extraction" could now contain all the data and formatting necessary to generate a full set of linked ensemble parts, ensconced within a single Finale master document. Limitations on the scope of format and layout control between parts and conductor score (including measure numbers and staff system breaks) suggested that this new feature was targeted to media production work, where quick turnaround and accuracy is a crucial factor, rather than publishing, though publishers still may use some aspects of linked parts to improve the part creation process. Finale 2007 introduced linked parts, which allow ensemble parts to remain linked to the master score.

Finale 2008 was the first version to come out with full Vista (32-bit only) support. It also changed the way several editing modes are accessed, by introducing the multi-purpose “selection tool” described above. The 2008 release offers the importation and/or recording of synchronized real-time audio as an additional single track in a document.

Finale 2009 was identified as the 20th Anniversary edition. It offers many fundamental workflow changes not seen since the program's inception, such as the organization of expressions by category. Also notable is the re-designed Page View, which enables the viewing and editing of multiple pages within the same document window: these pages may either be arranged in a horizontal line or tiled vertically within a window. Finale 2009 includes Garritan's new Aria Player Engine, and has new samples for this. The older Kontakt 2 Player is still supported, and the samples load under this also.

Finale 2010 was released in June 2009 with improvements to percussion notation and chord symbols. This version also introduced measure number enhancements, auto-ordered rehearsal marks and support for additional graphic formats.

Finale 2011 was released in June 2010 with additional Garritan Sounds, Alpha Notes (notation with note names inside), a new lyric entry window and other lyric enhancements, and a reworking of staff, system, and page layout handling. Introduced the new "Hide Empty Staves" command under the Staff menu, which hides all empty staves in systems. If notes are added to the system, the staff reappears automatically. (The capability of intentionally hiding staves containing notes is still available using a Staff Style). Other improvements to this Finale version include easier capo chords and a new Aria Player.

Finale 2012 was released in October 2011 with new functions as Finale's ScoreManager™, Unicode text support, creation of PDF files, an updated setup Wizard, improved sound management.

Finale 2014 was released in November 2013 with new functions. As with all previous releases, a new file format was introduced, which is incompatible with older versions of Finale. However, this time easier file exchange with future versions of Finale was promised. Finale 2014's new functions include a rewritten file format for forward and backward file compatibility, improved Apple OS X support, a new audio engine, additional Garritan sounds, and a new user interface. 2014d is the last version. An updated version, Finale 2014.5 fixes several problems.

Finale Version 25 was released on August 16, 2016. Some new features include: ReWire support, so that Finale can be used simultaneously and in sync with digital audio software. The new "Aria Player" speeds up and simplifies the choosing of Garritan instruments. Beginning with this version, the user manual is found entirely online. Band-in-a-Box and a couple of other plug-ins were removed. The ability to import scanned documents was removed. Several other features were added.

Finale Version 26 was released on October 10, 2018. This release includes new features such as automatically stacking articulations, automated slur collision avoidance, expedited processes for entering chord symbols and expressions, and additional templates.

Finale Version 27 was released on June 15, 2021. This release includes new features like interactive music sharing functionality, Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL) support, an improved instrument list, MusicXML 4.0, and numerous bug fixes.

In 2013, MakeMusic signed an agreement with Alfred Music. Under this agreement, Alfred Music is now the sole distributor of Finale and Garritan products.

Awards

 * Best Book/Video/Software at the 2015 Music & Sound Awards

General references

 * Matthew Nicholl & Richard Grudzinski, Music Notation: Preparing Scores and Parts, ed. Jonathan Feist. Boston: Berklee Press (2007)

title: Finale (scorewriter)


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Battle of Xiaoting

The Battle of Xiaoting (猇亭之戰), also known as the Battle of Yiling and the Battle of Yiling and Xiaoting, was fought between the state of Shu and the state of Wu, between the years 221 and 222 in the early Three Kingdoms period of China. The battle is significant because Wu was able to turn the situation from a series of initial losses into a defensive stalemate, before proceeding to win a decisive victory over Shu. The Wu victory halted the Shu invasion and preceded the death of Liu Bei, Shu's founding emperor.

Background
In late 219, Lü Meng, a general serving under Sun Quan, led an army to invade Liu Bei's territories in southern Jing Province. Guan Yu, Liu Bei's general in charge of guarding Jing Province, was away at the Battle of Fancheng and did not know about the invasion until after he returned from his Pyrrhic victory at Fancheng. He was surrounded by Sun Quan's forces in Maicheng (麥城; in Dangyang, Hubei), captured in an ambush while trying to break out of the siege, and eventually executed by Sun Quan's forces in Linju (臨沮; present-day Nanzhang County, Hubei).

On 25 November 220, Emperor Xian, the figurehead monarch of the Eastern Han dynasty, abdicated in favour of Cao Pi and ended the Eastern Han dynasty. On 11 December, Cao Pi established the state of Wei to replace the Eastern Han dynasty and became its first emperor. On 10 May 221, Liu Bei declared himself emperor and established a new state, historically known as Shu, to contest Cao Pi's claim to the Han throne. Around the same time, Sun Quan shifted the capital of his territories from Gong'an County to E County, which he renamed "Wuchang" (武昌). On 23 September 221, Sun Quan pledged allegiance to Cao Pi and became a vassal of the Wei state; in return, Cao Pi awarded Sun Quan the title "King of Wu" (吳王).

Prelude
Liu Bei desired to avenge Guan Yu and take back Jing Province, so he made preparations for war against Sun Quan. When Zhao Yun, a veteran general under Liu Bei, tried to dissuade his lord from going to war with Sun Quan, Liu Bei ignored him. Later, when Liu Bei launched the campaign against Sun Quan, he did not bring Zhao Yun along and instead left him behind to guard Jiangzhou. Qin Mi, an official under Liu Bei, also advised his lord against going to war with Sun Quan but ended up being thrown into prison.

Liu Bei ordered Zhang Fei to lead 10,000 troops from Langzhong to join him at Jiangzhou. During the mobilisation, Zhang Fei was assassinated by his subordinates Fan Qiang (范彊) and Zhang Da (張達), who cut off his head and brought it along with them as they defected to Sun Quan's side. Zhang Fei's adjutant wrote a report to Liu Bei. When Liu Bei heard that Zhang Fei's adjutant sent him a report, he exclaimed: "Oh! (Zhang) Fei is dead."

In August 221, Liu Bei personally led his army to attack Sun Quan. He also gave higher appointments to some mid-ranking Shu officers from Jing Province, such as Feng Xi and Zhang Nan, to further raise his army's morale for the campaign. Sun Quan sent Zhuge Jin as his representative to meet Liu Bei and start peace talks. When Zhuge Jin met Liu Bei, he said: "'I heard that your army has come from Baidicheng, and that your subjects have advised you to reject peace talks due to the hostilities between us which arose from the King of Wu's occupation of Jing Province and Guan Yu's death. I am deeply worried because such thinking shows narrow-mindedness on their part, as well as their failure to take the bigger picture into consideration. I shall attempt to explain the gravity of the situation to Your Majesty. If Your Majesty can temporarily lower your pride, put aside your anger, and carefully think through what I am about to say, I am sure that Your Majesty will be able to finalise your decision. There will also be no need to seek further counsel from your subjects. Is Your Majesty's relationship with Guan Yu comparable to that with the emperors (of the Han dynasty)? Is one Jing Province comparable to the entire Empire? Between your two enemies, whom do you hate more? If you can answer these questions, then I am sure it won't be difficult for you to finalise your decision.'" Liu Bei refused to listen to him.

Opening moves
In August 221, Liu Bei sent his generals Wu Ban and Feng Xi to attack the Wu positions at the Wu Gorge, which were guarded by Li Yi (李異) and Liu E (劉阿). After Wu Ban and Feng Xi achieved success, the Shu army, comprising over 40,000 troops, advanced further to Zigui County. Liu Bei also sent messengers to request reinforcements from the local tribes in Wuling Commandery (武陵郡). At Zigui, Liu Bei met up with Liao Hua, a former subordinate of Guan Yu. Liao Hua had become a prisoner-of-war in Wu after Guan Yu's death, but managed to escape and make his way back to Shu. Liu Bei appointed him as the Administrator of Yidu.

In response to the Shu invasion, Sun Quan appointed Lu Xun as his Grand Chief Controller (大都督) and ordered him to lead 50,000 troops to resist the enemy. Lu Xun had under his command several Wu officers such as Zhu Ran, Pan Zhang, Song Qian, Han Dang, Xu Sheng, Xianyu Dan (鮮于丹), and Sun Huan.

The Shu army's approach
In February 222, Liu Bei planned to lead his army from Zigui (秭歸) further into Jing Province to reclaim the province. However, the Shu general Huang Quan noted that the Wu forces were powerful and had used the Yangtze to their advantage, so he volunteered to lead the attack and suggested that Liu Bei remain behind as backup. Liu Bei refused to listen to him, appointed him as General Who Guards the North (鎮北將軍), and put him in charge of a separate Shu army to defend the northern flank (the northern bank of the Yangtze) from any possible attack by Wei forces. He then personally led the main Shu army, which travelled along the southern bank of the Yangtze.

Liu Bei also ordered Wu Ban (吳班) and Chen Shi (陳式) to lead the Shu navy to Yiling on the banks of the Yangtze. In the meantime, he also sent Ma Liang as an envoy to meet the tribes in Wuling Commandery and seek to bribe their chiefs with money and official titles to win their support. As the tribes in Wuling grew restless upon the Shu army's approach, Sun Quan sent Bu Zhi to guard Yiyang and deal with any unrest.

When Wu generals wanted to attack the Shu army as it approached, Lu Xun objected and said: "'Liu Bei is leading an army east to attack us and his army's morale is very high. Besides, his forces are based in high and mountainous terrain, so it's difficult for us to attack them. Even if we manage to win, we cannot completely defeat them. If we suffer any setback, our morale will be greatly affected and this isn't a small issue. Now, we should raise our troops' morale and make plans while waiting for changes in the situation. If we're on plains and flat ground, we should be worrying about sustaining heavy losses in skirmishes and charges. However, since the enemy is on mountainous terrain, they cannot conduct an all-out assault because they are sandwiched between wood and rocks. We should take advantage of this weakness of theirs.'" The Wu generals did not understand Lu Xun's reasoning and thought that he feared the enemy so they were very unhappy with him.

Stalemate
The Shu army passed through the Wu Gorge, Jianping (建平), Lianping (連平), and Lianwei (連圍), and arrived at the border of Yiling, where they constructed about 10 fortified garrisons. Liu Bei appointed Feng Xi as the Grand Controller (大督), Zhang Nan as the vanguard commander (前部督), and Fu Kuang, Zhao Rong (趙融), Liao Hua, and Fu Rong as detachment commanders (別督). The Shu and Wu forces were locked in a stalemate for about six months from February to July 222.

Liu Bei ordered Wu Ban to lead a few thousand soldiers out of the mountainous regions to set up camps on flat terrain and provoke the Wu forces to attack them. When the Wu officers wanted to respond to the taunts and attack the enemy, Lu Xun said: "This must be a trick. We should observe first."

As Lu Xun suspected, there were actually 8,000 Shu troops waiting in ambush in the nearby valleys. Since the Wu forces did not respond to the taunts, Liu Bei abandoned his plan to lure the enemy into the ambush and ordered the 8,000 soldiers to come out of the valleys. When Lu Xun heard about it, he told the Wu officers: "The reason why I did not follow your suggestions to attack the enemy is because I suspected there was something fishy about it." He then wrote a memorial to Sun Quan to emphasize the strategic importance of Yiling, point out some of Liu Bei's weaknesses, and reassure Sun Quan that he would defeat the enemy.

The Wu counter-attack and the burning of the Shu camps
Several days later, the Wu officers told Lu Xun: "'We should have attacked Liu Bei in the initial stages. Now, he has advanced further in by 500 to 600 li and we have been locked in a stalemate for seven to eight months. He has reinforced all his crucial positions, so even if we attack them it will yield nothing.'" Lu Xun replied: "'Liu Bei is cunning and experienced. In the initial stage, his army was very focused and its morale was very high, so we could not defeat them then. Now, however, since it has been quite some time, they are already weary, low on morale, and out of ideas. Now is the time for us to launch a multi-pronged assault on them.'"

Lu Xun then targeted one enemy camp and attacked it but failed to capture it. The Wu officers complained: "We are sacrificing our soldiers' lives for nothing." Lu Xun replied: "I have devised a strategy for defeating the enemy." He then ordered his men to carry a pile of straw each and launch a fire attack on the enemy. Upon the commencement of the fire attack, Lu Xun led all the Wu units on an all-out assault on the Shu forces. Zhu Ran defeated the Shu vanguard force, cut off its retreat route and forced Liu Bei to retreat. Pan Zhang's subordinates killed Feng Xi and inflicted heavy casualties on Feng's unit. Song Qian also destroyed five Shu garrisons and killed its defending officers. Zhang Nan, Shamoke (a tribal king allied with Shu), Ma Liang, and Wang Fu were killed in action, while Du Lu (杜路) and Liu Ning (劉寧) were forced to surrender to Wu. Over 40 Shu camps were destroyed by the Wu forces. Throughout the Shu army, only Xiang Chong's unit managed to retreat without sustaining any losses.

The actual location of the battle is at the juncture between the west of Yidu County and east of Changyang County in Yichang, Hubei.

Liu Bei's retreat to Baidicheng
Liu Bei and his remaining troops retreated to the Ma'an Hills (馬鞍山; east of present-day Changyang County, Hubei), where they continued to be fiercely assaulted by the Wu forces from all directions. At the same time, landslides occurred at the Ma'an Hills and caused the Shu forces to sustain thousands of casualties. The Wu general Sun Huan fought with his life and managed to break through enemy lines and capture the key positions in the hills. Liu Bei was forced to retreat through the hazardous mountainous terrain and barely escaped alive at night. During the retreat, he ordered his men to pile up their armour and set them on fire to create barriers for the pursuing Wu forces.

Liu Bei regrouped his scattered forces and ordered them to abandon their boats and travel on foot towards Yufu County, which he renamed "Yong'an" (永安; literally "everlasting peace"). The Wu officers Li Yi (李異) and Liu E (劉阿) led their troops in pursuit of Liu Bei and garrisoned at Nanshan (南山). In late September or early October 222, Liu Bei and his forces retreated further to the Wu Gorge.

By the time Liu Bei reached the safety of Baidicheng, all his boats, military equipment, and supplies had been captured by Wu forces. The dead bodies of Shu soldiers floated in the river and obstructed its flow. Liu Bei was extremely upset and furious with his defeat. He exclaimed: "Is it not the will of Heaven that I must be humiliated by Lu Xun?" When Zhao Yun showed up at Yong'an with reinforcements from Jiangzhou, the pursuing Wu forces had already retreated on their own.

Lu Xun refusing to help Sun Huan
In the earlier stages of the battle, Sun Huan led a separate force to attack the Shu vanguard force at Yidao but ended up being besieged by the enemy. He requested for reinforcements from Lu Xun but was denied. The other Wu officers told Lu Xun: "General Sun is a relative of our lord. He is currently under siege, so shouldn't we help him?" Lu Xun replied: "He has the support of his men, his base is well defended, and he has sufficient supplies. There is nothing to worry about. When my plans are in motion, even if we don't help him, the siege on him will automatically be lifted." After the Wu victory at Xiaoting, Sun Huan came to see Lu Xun and said: "Earlier on, I was indeed very resentful when you refused to help me. But now, after the victory, I see that you have your own way of doing things."

Wu officers' reluctance to follow Lu Xun's orders
Many of the Wu officers who participated in the battle had either served in Wu since Sun Ce's time or were relatives of Sun Quan's family, so they viewed themselves highly and were unwilling to follow Lu Xun's orders. Lu Xun placed his sword on the desk and said: "'Liu Bei is well known throughout the Empire, and even Cao Cao feared him. Now, he is at our borders and we have a tough fight ahead. All of you gentlemen have received grace from the State, so you should cooperate harmoniously and work together to defeat the enemy in order to repay the State's kindness. You should not be behaving as you are now. I may be a mere scholar, but I have received orders from our Lord. The reason why the State asks you to lower yourselves and submit to my command is because I have a modicum of value and I can endure humiliation for the sake of fulfilling a greater task. Each of you has your own duties so you cannot excuse yourselves from them! Military rules are long established. You shouldn't break them.'"

The Wu officers began to show greater respect for Lu Xun after the Wu victory, which was largely due to his strategies. Lu Xun did not report this incident to Sun Quan, who found out about it himself after the battle. When Sun Quan asked Lu Xun about it, Lu replied that he valued those officers even though they were insubordinate towards him, and decided to put up with them because he felt it was important to maintain good working relationships with them to fulfil their common goal of resisting the Shu invasion. Sun Quan praised him and rewarded him handsomely.

Heroics of Fu Rong and Cheng Ji
Fu Rong volunteered to cover the rear while the Shu forces were retreating from Yiling and Xiaoting. He continued to hold his ground firmly and vent his fury on the enemy even though all his comrades had already been killed. When the Wu soldiers called for him to surrender, he replied: "Dogs of Wu! Do you think a Han officer will ever surrender?" He was eventually killed in action.

Cheng Ji also covered the rear during the Shu retreat. As the enemy approached, someone urged him to abandon his boat and escape, but he replied: "I have never fled from battle throughout my military career. Besides, the Emperor is currently in a dangerous situation." When the Wu forces showed up, Cheng Ji wielded a ji, fought fiercely and managed to sink some enemy boats before he was eventually overwhelmed by the enemy and killed.

Cao Pi foreseeing Liu Bei's defeat
When Cao Pi received news that the Shu forces had set up linked camps over a distance of more than 700 li, he told his subjects: "'(Liu) Bei does not know military strategy. How can anyone fight a war with camps laid out over a distance of 700 li? 'A person who deploys troops in forested and damp areas with obstacles is bound to be captured by the enemy.' This is something to be avoided in war. I will hear from Sun Quan very soon.'" He received a report about the Wu victory seven days later.

Aftermath
Huang Quan and the separate Shu army on the northern bank of the Yangtze were cut off from the main Shu army during the Wu counterattack and could not return to Shu. In desperation, Huang Quan and his subordinate Pang Lin led their troops to defect to Wei.

Small rebellions broke out in Lingling (零陵) and Guiyang (桂陽) commanderies after the Shu forces retreated. Bu Zhi, who was stationed at Yiyang before the battle, led Wu forces to suppress them.

After the battle, Xu Sheng, Pan Zhang, Song Qian and other Wu officers suggested attacking Baidicheng to capture Liu Bei. When Sun Quan asked Lu Xun for his opinion, Lu Xun, Zhu Ran and Luo Tong said that when Cao Pi amassed his forces and seemed like he was going to help Wu attack Shu, he actually had sinister intentions. They cautioned Sun Quan about this and suggested to abandon their pursuit of Liu Bei and return to Wu. Sun Quan heeded their advice. Not long later, Cao Pi led the Wei armies to invade Wu from three directions.

When Liu Bei heard of the Wei invasion of Wu, he wrote to Lu Xun: "'The enemy (Wei) is at Jiangling now. If I launch another attack again, in your opinion, do you think I will succeed?'" Lu Xun replied: "'I am afraid your army has recently suffered defeats and has yet to recover. Now is the time for you to make reconciliations, rest and recuperate. This is not the time for you to launch another assault on us again. However, if you do not consider carefully and plan to dispatch all your remaining forces on another attack, I assure you none of those you send here will return alive.'"

Liu Bei became critically ill in April 223. Before he died on 10 June, he named his son Liu Shan as his successor and appointed Zhuge Liang and Li Yan as regents to assist Liu Shan. After taking over the reins of power, Zhuge Liang made peace with Wu and re-established the Wu–Shu alliance against Wei.

Wu forces

 * Grand Chief Controller (大都督) Lu Xun
 * General of Illustrious Martial Might (昭武將軍) Zhu Ran
 * General Who Inspires Might (振威將軍) Pan Zhang
 * Lieutenant General (偏將軍) Han Dang
 * General Who Builds Martial Might (建武將軍) Xu Sheng
 * General of the Household Who Pacifies the East (安東中郎將) Sun Huan
 * General of the Household Who Builds Loyalty (建忠中郎將) Luo Tong
 * Song Qian
 * Xianyu Dan (鮮于丹)
 * Li Yi (李異)
 * Liu E (劉阿)
 * Jiang Yi

 * Non-participants
 * King of Wu (吳王) Sun Quan
 * General Who Pacifies the Rong (平戎將軍) Bu Zhi

Shu forces

 * Main army
 * Emperor of Shu Han (蜀漢皇帝) Liu Bei
 * Grand Controller (大督) Feng Xi
 * Vanguard (前部) Zhang Nan
 * Detachment Commander (別督) Fu Kuang
 * Detachment Commander (別督) Zhao Rong (趙融)
 * Detachment Commander (別督) Liao Hua
 * Detachment Commander (別督) Fu Rong
 * Palace Attendant (侍中) Ma Liang
 * General of the Standard (牙門將) Xiang Chong (向寵)
 * Aide-de-camp (別駕從事) Li Chao
 * Assistant Officer and Libationer (從事祭酒) Cheng Ji
 * Wu Ban
 * Chen Shi
 * Wang Fu
 * Du Lu (杜路)
 * Liu Ning (劉寧)

 * North army
 * General Who Guards the North (鎮北將軍) Huang Quan
 * Assistant Officer in Headquarters Office (治中從事) Pang Lin

 * Allies
 * Shamoke

 * Non-participants
 * General of the Assisting Army (翊軍將軍) Zhao Yun

In Romance of the Three Kingdoms
The events before, during, and after the Battle of Xiaoting are mentioned in chapters 81–84 of the 14th-century historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo Yanyi) by Luo Guanzhong. Some fictitious stories were included and actual events were exaggerated for dramatic effect. The following are some notable events related to the battle, as described in the novel:

Opposition to Liu Bei's decision to go to war
Liu Bei plans to go to war with Sun Quan to avenge Guan Yu and retake Jing Province, but his decision is opposed by many of his subjects. The first person who attempts to dissuade him from going to war is Zhao Yun, who is ignored. After that, other Shu officials such as Ma Liang and Chen Zhen urge Zhuge Liang to stop Liu Bei, so Zhuge Liang brings them along to meet Liu Bei and advise him against his decision, but Liu Bei refuses to accept their advice. Just when Liu Bei is preparing for war, Qin Mi opposes his decision. Liu Bei is so angry that he wants to execute Qin Mi. However, Qin Mi is spared after Zhuge Liang and the rest of the Shu imperial court plead with Liu Bei. Zhuge Liang then writes a memorial to Liu Bei to explain why he should not go to war with Sun Quan, but Liu Bei throws the memorial to the ground after reading it and exclaims, "My decision is final. There is no need to advise me against my decision anymore!"

The historical text Sanguozhi did not mention anything about Zhuge Liang opposing Liu Bei's decision to go to war with Sun Quan. However, it did mention that Zhao Yun and Qin Mi attempted to dissuade Liu Bei: Zhao Yun advised Liu Bei against attacking Sun Quan, but was ignored. Qin Mi was imprisoned by Liu Bei when he advised him against the campaign, but was released later.
 * Historicity

Huang Zhong's death
The Shu general Huang Zhong participates in the campaign even though he is already over 70 years old at the time. He slays Pan Zhang's subordinate, Shi Ji (史蹟), and defeats Pan Zhang in an engagement on the first day. On the second day, while pursuing the retreating Pan Zhang, he falls into an ambush and is surrounded by Zhou Tai, Han Dang, Ling Tong and Pan Zhang. He is hit by an arrow fired by Ma Zhong (馬忠). Guan Xing and Zhang Bao save him, but he dies from his wound that night. Liu Bei mourns his death. Since the Battle of Xiaoting historically took place between 221 and 222, going by the novel's account, Huang Zhong's year of death should be around 221–222.

Huang Zhong's biography in the Sanguozhi stated that Huang Zhong died in 220, a year after the Hanzhong Campaign ended. His cause of death is unknown.
 * Historicity

Guan Xing killing Pan Zhang
In one of the early engagements, Guan Xing encounters Pan Zhang, who captured his father Guan Yu in an ambush during the Battle of Maicheng. In his eagerness to avenge his father, Guan Xing pursues Pan Zhang into a valley but loses his way inside. After nightfall, Guan Xing wanders around until he finds a house inhabited by an old man and stays there for the night. He sees his father's portrait on the wall in the house. Later that night, Pan Zhang also finds his way to the house and asks to stay there. Guan Xing sees Pan Zhang and shouts at him. Just as Pan Zhang is about to leave, he encounters Guan Yu's ghost and is petrified. Guan Xing catches up with Pan Zhang, kills him, digs out his heart and places it on the altar as an offering to his father's spirit.

Pan Zhang's biography in the Sanguozhi stated that he died in 234 – more than 10 years after the Battle of Xiaoting. His cause of death is unknown. Guan Yu's biography mentioned that Guan Xing served as a civil official in Shu after reaching adulthood (around the age of 19) and died a few years later while in office, so Guan Xing was most probably not involved in the battle.
 * Historicity

Gan Ning's death
Gan Ning is down with dysentery around the time of the Battle of Xiaoting, but he still participates in the battle regardless of his illness. He is resting when he hears enemy forces approaching, so he quickly mounts his horse and prepares for battle. He encounters a group of tribal warriors led by Shamoke. He sees that the enemy force is too large and decides to withdraw. While retreating on horseback, Gan Ning is hit in the head by an arrow fired by Shamoke. He flees, with the arrow still embedded in his head, reaches Fuchi (富池; in present-day Yangxin County, Hubei), sits down under a tree and dies. Dozens of crows on the tree fly around his body. When Sun Quan learns of Gan Ning's death, he is deeply saddened and gives orders for Gan to be buried with full honours.

No details were provided on Gan Ning's cause and time of death in his biography in the Sanguozhi. Gan Ning's death was briefly stated as follows: When Gan Ning died, Sun Quan deeply lamented his death.
 * Historicity

Zhao Yun killing Zhu Ran
Liu Bei retreats under the protection of Guan Xing and Zhang Bao after his camps are set on fire by the Wu forces, who continue to pursue him. At a critical moment, Zhao Yun shows up and blocks the attacks from the enemy. Zhao Yun encounters Zhu Ran during the battle and kills him. He protects Liu Bei while the latter heads towards Baidicheng.

The Zhao Yun Biezhuan stated that Zhao Yun did not participate in the Battle of Xiaoting. Before the battle, Zhao Yun advised Liu Bei against going to war with Sun Quan but was ignored. Liu Bei ordered him to remain behind and guard Jiangzhou. When Zhao Yun learnt that Liu Bei had been defeated at Zigui, he led troops from Jiangzhou to Yong'an to help his lord.
 * Historicity

Zhu Ran's biography in the Sanguozhi stated that he died in 249 at the age of 68 (by East Asian age reckoning) – about 27 years after the Battle of Xiaoting. Besides, he outlived Zhao Yun, who historically died in 229.

Lady Sun's death
News of Liu Bei's defeat in the battle reach his ex-wife Lady Sun, who had returned to Wu. After hearing rumours that Liu Bei had been killed in battle, Lady Sun ventures out to the bank of the Yangtze, where she faces the west and cries before drowning herself.

Nothing was recorded in history about what happened to Lady Sun after she left Liu Bei and returned to Wu territory.
 * Historicity

title: Battle of Xiaoting


text:
Coronal mass ejection

A coronal mass ejection (CME) is a significant ejection of magnetic field and accompanying plasma mass from the Sun's corona into the heliosphere. CMEs are often associated with solar flares and other forms of solar activity, but a broadly accepted theoretical understanding of these relationships has not been established.

If a CME enters interplanetary space, it is referred to as an interplanetary coronal mass ejection (ICME). ICMEs are capable of reaching and colliding with Earth's magnetosphere, where they can cause geomagnetic storms, aurorae, and in rare cases damage to electrical power grids. The largest recorded geomagnetic perturbation, resulting presumably from a CME, was the solar storm of 1859. Also known as the Carrington Event, it disabled parts of the newly created United States telegraph network, starting fires and electrically shocking some telegraph operators.

Near solar maxima, the Sun produces about three CMEs every day, whereas near solar minima, there is about one CME every five days.

Physical description
CMEs release large quantities of matter and magnetic flux from the Sun's atmosphere into the solar wind and interplanetary space. The ejected matter is a plasma consisting primarily of electrons and protons embedded within the ejected magnetic field. This magnetic field is commonly in the form of a flux rope, a helical magnetic field with changing pitch angles.

The average mass ejected is 1.6e12 kg. However, the estimated mass values for CMEs are only lower limits, because coronagraph measurements provide only two-dimensional data.

CMEs erupt from strongly twisted or sheared, large-scale magnetic field structures in the corona that are kept in equilibrium by overlying magnetic fields.

Origin
CMEs erupt from the lower corona, where processes associated with the local magnetic field dominate over other processes. As a result, the coronal magnetic field plays an important role in the formation and eruption of CMEs. Pre-eruption structures originate from magnetic fields that are initially generated in the Sun's interior by the solar dynamo. These magnetic fields rise to the Sun's surface—the photosphere—where they may form localized areas of highly concentrated magnetic flux and expand into the lower solar atmosphere forming active regions. At the photosphere, active region magnetic flux is often distributed in a dipole configuration, that is, with two adjacent areas of opposite magnetic polarity across which the magnetic field arches. Over time, the concentrated magnetic flux cancels and disperses across the Sun's surface, merging with the remnants of past active regions to become a part of the quiet Sun. Pre-eruption CME structures can be present at different stages of the growth and decay of these regions, but they always lie above polarity inversion lines (PIL), or boundaries across which the sign of the vertical component of the magnetic field reverses. PILs may exist in, around, and between active regions or form in the quiet Sun between active region remnants. More complex magnetic flux configurations, such as quadrupolar fields, can also host pre-eruption structures.

In order for pre-eruption CME structures to develop, large amounts of energy must be stored and be readily available to be released. As a result of the dominance of magnetic field processes in the lower corona, the majority of the energy must be stored as magnetic energy. The magnetic energy that is freely available to be released from a pre-eruption structure, referred to as the magnetic free energy or nonpotential energy of the structure, is the excess magnetic energy stored by the structure's magnetic configuration relative to that stored by the lowest-energy magnetic configuration the underlying photospheric magnetic flux distribution could theoretically take, a potential field state. Emerging magnetic flux and photospheric motions continuously shifting the footpoints of a structure can result in magnetic free energy building up in the coronal magnetic field as twist or shear. Some pre-eruption structures, referred to as, take on an S or reverse-S shape as shear accumulates. This has been observed in active region coronal loops and filaments with forward-S sigmoids more common in the southern hemisphere and reverse-S sigmoids more common in the northern hemisphere.

Magnetic flux ropes—twisted and sheared magnetic flux tubes that can carry electric current and magnetic free energy—are an integral part of the post-eruption CME structure; however, whether flux ropes are always present in the pre-eruption structure or whether they are created during the eruption from a strongly sheared core field (see ) is subject to ongoing debate.

Some pre-eruption structures have been observed to support prominences, also known as filaments, composed of much cooler material than the surrounding coronal plasma. Prominences are embedded in magnetic field structures referred to as prominence cavities, or filament channels, which may constitute part of a pre-eruption structure (see ).

Early evolution
The early evolution of a CME involves its initiation from a pre-eruption structure in the corona and the acceleration that follows. The processes involved in the early evolution of CMEs are poorly understood due to a lack of observational evidence.

Initiation
CME initiation occurs when a pre-eruption structure in an equilibrium state enters a nonequilibrium or metastable state where energy can be released to drive an eruption. The specific processes involved in CME initiation are debated, and various models have been proposed to explain this phenomenon based on physical speculation. Furthermore, different CMEs may be initiated by different processes.

It is unknown whether a magnetic flux rope exists prior to initiation, in which case either ideal or non-ideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) processes drive the expulsion of this flux rope, or whether a flux rope is created during the eruption by non-ideal process. Under ideal MHD, initiation may involve ideal instabilities or catastrophic loss of equilibrium along an existing flux rope: Under non-ideal MHD, initiations mechanisms may involve resistive instabilities or magnetic reconnection:
 * The kink instability occurs when a magnetic flux rope is twisted to a critical point, whereupon the flux rope is unstable to further twisting.
 * The torus instability occurs when the magnetic field strength of an arcade overlying a flux rope decreases rapidly with height. When this decrease is sufficiently rapid, the flux rope is unstable to further expansion.
 * The catastrophe model involves a catastrophic loss of equilibrium.
 * Tether-cutting, or flux cancellation, occurs in strongly sheared arcades when nearly antiparallel field lines on opposite sides of the arcade form a current sheet and reconnect with each other. This can form a helical flux rope or cause a flux rope already present to grow and its axis to rise.
 * The magnetic breakout model consists of an initial quadrupolar magnetic topology with a null point above a central flux system. As shearing motions cause this central flux system to rise, the null point forms a current sheet and the core flux system reconnects with the overlying magnetic field.

Initial acceleration
Following initiation, CMEs are subject to different forces that either assist or inhibit their rise through the lower corona. Downward magnetic tension force exerted by the strapping magnetic field as it is stretched and, to a lesser extent, the gravitational pull of the Sun oppose movement of the core CME structure. In order for sufficient acceleration to be provided, past models have involved magnetic reconnection below the core field or an ideal MHD process, such as instability or acceleration from the solar wind.

In the majority of CME events, acceleration is provided by magnetic reconnection cutting the strapping field's connections to the photosphere from below the core and outflow from this reconnection pushing the core upward. When the initial rise occurs, the opposite sides of the strapping field below the rising core are oriented nearly antiparallel to one another and are brought together to form a current sheet above the PIL. Fast magnetic reconnection can be excited along the current sheet by microscopic instabilities, resulting in the rapid release of stored magnetic energy as kinetic, thermal, and nonthermal energy. The restructuring of the magnetic field cuts the strapping field's connections to the photosphere thereby decreasing the downward magnetic tension force while the upward reconnection outflow pushes the CME structure upwards. A positive feedback loop results as the core is pushed upwards and the sides of the strapping field are brought in closer and closer contact to produce additional magnetic reconnection and rise. While upward reconnection outflow accelerates the core, simultaneous downward outflow is sometimes responsible for other phenomena associated with CMEs (see ).

In cases where significant magnetic reconnection does not occur, ideal MHD instabilities or the dragging force from the solar wind can theoretically accelerate a CME. However, if sufficient acceleration is not provided, the CME structure may fall back in what is referred to as a failed or confined eruption.

Coronal signatures
The early evolution of CMEs is frequently associated with other solar phenomena observed in the low corona, such as eruptive prominences and solar flares. CMEs that have no observed signatures are sometimes referred to as stealth CMEs.

Prominences embedded in some CME pre-eruption structures may erupt with the CME as eruptive prominences. Eruptive prominences are associated with at least 70% of all CMEs and are often embedded within the bases of CME flux ropes. When observed in white-light coronagraphs, the eruptive prominence material, if present, corresponds to the observed bright core of dense material.

When magnetic reconnection is excited along a current sheet of a rising CME core structure, the downward reconnection outflows can collide with loops below to form a cusp-shaped, two-ribbon solar flare.

CME eruptions can also produce EUV waves, also known as EIT waves after the Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope or as Moreton waves when observed in the chromosphere, which are fast-mode MHD wave fronts that emanate from the site of the CME.

A coronal dimming is a localized decrease in extreme ultraviolet and soft X-ray emissions in the lower corona. When associated with a CME, coronal dimmings are thought to occur predominantly due to a decrease in plasma density caused by mass outflows during the expansion of the associated CME. They often occur either in pairs located within regions of opposite magnetic polarity, a core dimming, or in a more widespread area, a secondary dimming. Core dimmings are interpreted as the footpoint locations of the erupting flux rope; secondary dimmings are interpreted as the result of the expansion of the overall CME structure and are generally more diffuse and shallow. Coronal dimming was first reported in 1974, and, due to their appearance resembling that of coronal holes, they were sometimes referred to as transient coronal holes.

Propagation
Observations of CMEs are typically through white-light coronagraphs which measure the Thomson scattering of sunlight off of free electrons within the CME plasma. An observed CME may have any or all of three distinctive features: a bright core, a dark surrounding cavity, and a bright leading edge. The bright core is usually interpreted as a prominence embedded in the CME (see ) with the leading edge as an area of compressed plasma ahead of the CME flux rope. However, some CMEs exhibit more complex geometry.

From white-light coronagraph observations, CMEs have been measured to reach speeds in the plane-of-sky ranging from 20 to 3200 km/s with an average speed of 489 km/s. Observations of CME speeds indicate that CMEs tend to accelerate or decelerate until they reach the speed of the solar wind.

When observed in interplanetary space at distances greater than about 50 solar radius away from the Sun, CMEs are sometimes referred to as interplanetary CMEs, or ICMEs.

Interactions in the heliosphere
As CMEs propagate through the heliosphere, they may interact with the surrounding solar wind, the interplanetary magnetic field, and other CMEs and celestial bodies.

CMEs can experience aerodynamic drag forces that act to bring them to kinematic equilibrium with the solar wind. As a consequence, CMEs faster than the solar wind tend to slow down whereas CMEs slower than the solar wind tend to speed up until their speed matches that of the solar wind.

How CMEs evolve as they propagate through the heliosphere is poorly understood. Models of their evolution have been proposed that are accurate to some CMEs but not others. Aerodynamic drag and snowplow models assume that ICME evolution is governed by its interactions with the solar wind. Aerodynamic drag alone may be able to account for the evolution of some ICMEs, but not all of them.

CMEs typically reach Earth one to five days after leaving the Sun. The strongest deceleration or acceleration occurs close to the Sun, but it can continue even beyond Earth orbit (1 AU), which was observed using measurements at Mars and by the Ulysses spacecraft. ICMEs faster than about 500 km/s eventually drive a shock wave. This happens when the speed of the ICME in the frame of reference moving with the solar wind is faster than the local fast magnetosonic speed. Such shocks have been observed directly by coronagraphs in the corona, and are related to type II radio bursts. They are thought to form sometimes as low as (solar radii). They are also closely linked with the acceleration of solar energetic particles.

As ICMEs propagate through the interplanetary medium, they may collide with other ICMEs in what is referred to as CME–CME interaction or CME cannibalism.

During such CME-CME interactions, the first CME may clear the way for the second one and/or when two CMEs collide  it can lead to more severe impacts on Earth. Historical records show that the most extreme space weather events involved multiple successive CMEs. For example, the famous Carrington event in 1859 had several eruptions and caused auroras to be visible at low latitudes for four nights. Similarly, the solar storm of September 1770 lasted for nearly nine days, and caused repeated low-latitude auroras. The interaction between two moderate CMEs between the Sun and Earth can create extreme conditions on Earth. Recent studies have shown that the magnetic structure in particular its chirality/handedness, of a CME can greatly affect how it interacts with Earth's magnetic field. This interaction can result in the conservation or loss of magnetic flux, particularly its southward magnetic field component, through magnetic reconnection with the interplanetary magnetic field.

Morphology
In the solar wind, CMEs manifest as magnetic clouds. They have been defined as regions of enhanced magnetic field strength, smooth rotation of the magnetic field vector, and low proton temperature. The association between CMEs and magnetic clouds was made by Burlaga et al. in 1982 when a magnetic cloud was observed by Helios-1 two days after being observed by SMM. However, because observations near Earth are usually done by a single spacecraft, many CMEs are not seen as being associated with magnetic clouds. The typical structure observed for a fast CME by a satellite such as ACE is a fast-mode shock wave followed by a dense (and hot) sheath of plasma (the downstream region of the shock) and a magnetic cloud.

Other signatures of magnetic clouds are now used in addition to the one described above: among other, bidirectional superthermal electrons, unusual charge state or abundance of iron, helium, carbon, and/or oxygen.

The typical time for a magnetic cloud to move past a satellite at the L1 point is 1 day corresponding to a radius of 0.15 AU with a typical speed of 450 km/s and magnetic field strength of 20 nT.

Solar cycle
The frequency of ejections depends on the phase of the solar cycle: from about 0.2 per day near the solar minimum to 3.5 per day near the solar maximum. However, the peak CME occurrence rate is often 6–12 months after sunspot number reaches its maximum.

Impact on Earth

Only a very small fraction of CMEs are directed toward, and reach, the Earth. A CME arriving at Earth results in a shock wave causing a geomagnetic storm that may disrupt Earth's magnetosphere, compressing it on the day side and extending the night-side magnetic tail. When the magnetosphere reconnects on the nightside, it releases power on the order of terawatts directed back toward Earth's upper atmosphere. This can result in events such as the March 1989 geomagnetic storm.

CMEs, along with solar flares, can disrupt radio transmissions and cause damage to satellites and electrical transmission line facilities, resulting in potentially massive and long-lasting power outages.

Shocks in the upper corona driven by CMEs can also accelerate solar energetic particles toward the Earth resulting in gradual solar particle events. Interactions between these energetic particles and the Earth can cause an increase in the number of free electrons in the ionosphere, especially in the high-latitude polar regions, enhancing radio wave absorption, especially within the D-region of the ionosphere, leading to polar cap absorption events.

The interaction of CMEs with the Earth's magnetosphere leads to dramatic changes in the outer radiation belt, with either a decrease or an increase of relativistic particle fluxes by orders of magnitude. The changes in radiation belt particle fluxes are caused by acceleration, scattering and radial diffusion of relativistic electrons, due to the interactions with various plasma waves.

Halo coronal mass ejections
A halo coronal mass ejection is a CME which appears in white-light coronagraph observations as an expanding ring completely surrounding the occulting disk of the coronagraph. Halo CMEs are interpreted as CMEs directed toward or away from the observing coronagraph. When the expanding ring does not completely surround the occulting disk, but has an angular width of more than 120 degrees around the disk, the CME is referred to as a partial halo coronal mass ejection. Partial and full halo CMEs have been found to make up about 10% of all CMEs with about 4% of all CMEs being full halo CMEs. Frontside, or Earth-direct, halo CMEs are often associated with Earth-impacting CMEs; however, not all frontside halo CMEs impact Earth.

Future risk
In 2019, researchers used an alternative method (Weibull distribution) and estimated the chance of Earth being hit by a Carrington-class storm in the next decade to be between 0.46% and 1.88%.

First traces
CMEs have been observed indirectly for thousands of years via aurora. Other indirect observations that predated the discovery of CMEs were through measurements of geomagnetic perturbations, radioheliograph measurements of solar radio bursts, and in-situ measurements of interplanetary shocks.

The largest recorded geomagnetic perturbation, resulting presumably from a CME, coincided with the first-observed solar flare on 1 September 1859. The resulting solar storm of 1859 is referred to as the Carrington Event. The flare and the associated sunspots were visible to the naked eye, and the flare was independently observed by English astronomers R. C. Carrington and R. Hodgson. At around the same time as the flare, a magnetometer at Kew Gardens recorded what would become known as a magnetic crochet, a magnetic field detected by ground-based magnetometers induced by a perturbation of Earth's ionosphere by ionizing soft X-rays. This could not easily be understood at the time because it predated the discovery of X-rays in 1895 and the recognition of the ionosphere in 1902.

About 18 hours after the flare, further geomagnetic perturbations were recorded by multiple magnetometers as a part of a geomagnetic storm. The storm disabled parts of the recently created US telegraph network, starting fires and shocking some telegraph operators.

First optical observations
The first optical observation of a CME was made on 14 December 1971 using the coronagraph of Orbiting Solar Observatory 7 (OSO-7). It was first described by R. Tousey of the Naval Research Laboratory in a research paper published in 1973. The discovery image (256 × 256 pixels) was collected on a Secondary Electron Conduction (SEC) vidicon tube, transferred to the instrument computer after being digitized to 7 bits. Then it was compressed using a simple run-length encoding scheme and sent down to the ground at 200 bit/s. A full, uncompressed image would take 44 minutes to send down to the ground. The telemetry was sent to ground support equipment (GSE) which built up the image onto Polaroid print. David Roberts, an electronics technician working for NRL who had been responsible for the testing of the SEC-vidicon camera, was in charge of day-to-day operations. He thought that his camera had failed because certain areas of the image were much brighter than normal. But on the next image the bright area had moved away from the Sun and he immediately recognized this as being unusual and took it to his supervisor, Dr. Guenter Brueckner, and then to the solar physics branch head, Dr. Tousey. Earlier observations of coronal transients or even phenomena observed visually during solar eclipses are now understood as essentially the same thing.

Instruments
On 1 November 1994, NASA launched the Wind spacecraft as a solar wind monitor to orbit Earth's Lagrange point as the interplanetary component of the Global Geospace Science (GGS) Program within the International Solar Terrestrial Physics (ISTP) program. The spacecraft is a spin axis-stabilized satellite that carries eight instruments measuring solar wind particles from thermal to greater than MeV energies, electromagnetic radiation from DC to 13 MHz radio waves, and gamma-rays.

On 25 October 2006, NASA launched STEREO, two near-identical spacecraft which, from widely separated points in their orbits, are able to produce the first stereoscopic images of CMEs and other solar activity measurements. The spacecraft orbit the Sun at distances similar to that of Earth, with one slightly ahead of Earth and the other trailing. Their separation gradually increased so that after four years they were almost diametrically opposite each other in orbit.

Notable coronal mass ejections
On 9 March 1989, a CME occurred, which struck Earth four days later on 13 March. It caused power failures in Quebec, Canada and short-wave radio interference.

On 23 July 2012, a massive, and potentially damaging, solar superstorm (solar flare, CME, solar EMP) occurred but missed Earth, an event that many scientists consider to be a Carrington-class event.

On 14 October 2014, an ICME was photographed by the Sun-watching spacecraft PROBA2 (ESA), Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (ESA/NASA), and Solar Dynamics Observatory (NASA) as it left the Sun, and STEREO-A observed its effects directly at $1 AU$. ESA's Venus Express gathered data. The CME reached Mars on 17 October and was observed by the Mars Express, MAVEN, Mars Odyssey, and Mars Science Laboratory missions. On 22 October, at $3.1 AU$, it reached comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, perfectly aligned with the Sun and Mars, and was observed by Rosetta. On 12 November, at $9.9 AU$, it was observed by Cassini at Saturn. The New Horizons spacecraft was at $31.6 AU$ approaching Pluto when the CME passed three months after the initial eruption, and it may be detectable in the data. Voyager 2 has data that can be interpreted as the passing of the CME, 17 months after. The Curiosity rover's RAD instrument, Mars Odyssey, Rosetta and Cassini showed a sudden decrease in galactic cosmic rays (Forbush decrease) as the CME's protective bubble passed by.

Stellar coronal mass ejections
There have been a small number of CMEs observed on other stars, all of which have been found on red dwarfs. These have been detected mainly by spectroscopy, most often by studying Balmer lines: the material ejected toward the observer causes asymmetry in the blue wing of the line profiles due to Doppler shift. This enhancement can be seen in absorption when it occurs on the stellar disc (the material is cooler than its surroundings), and in emission when it is outside the disc. The observed projected velocities of CMEs range from ≈84 to 5800 km/s. There are few stellar CME candidates in shorter wavelengths in UV or X-ray data. Compared to activity on the Sun, CME activity on other stars seems to be far less common. The low number of stellar CME detections can be caused by lower intrinsic CME rates compared to the models (e.g. due to magnetic suppression), projection effects, or overestimated Balmer signatures because of the unknown plasma parameters of the stellar CMEs.

title: Coronal mass ejection


text:
Pascual Cervera y Topete

Admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete (18 February 1839, Medina-Sidonia, Cádiz, Spain – 3 April 1909, Puerto Real, Cádiz, Spain) was a prominent Spanish naval officer with the rank of Almirante (admiral) who served in a number of high positions within the Spanish Navy and had fought in several wars during the 19th century. Having served in Morocco, the Philippines, and Cuba, he went on to be Spain's naval minister, chief of naval staff, naval attaché in London, the captain of several warships, and most notably, commander of the Cuba Squadron during the Spanish–American War. Although he believed that the Spanish Navy was suffering from multiple problems and that there was no chance for victory over the United States Navy, Cervera took command of the squadron and fought in a last stand during the Battle of Santiago de Cuba.

Early life and service
Pascual Cervera y Topete was born in Medina-Sidonia in the province of Cadiz, the son of a Spanish Army officer who fought against French invasion of Spain during the Napoleonic Wars. Cervera entered the naval college at the age of thirteen and was later made a midshipman during his first voyage to Havana in 1858. He later made lieutenant junior grade at the age of 21 and spent time serving in both Cuba (during the early part of the Ten Years' War) and also Morocco (during the Spanish–Moroccan war). Later, Cervera was deployed to the Spanish Philippines, where, under the command of Admiral Casto Méndez Núñez, in September 1864 he took part in the storming of Fort Pagalungan against the Moro rebels. During that action, he distinguished himself by capturing the enemy flag and was promoted to lieutenant for his service, receiving a mention in the official report on the battle. Afterwards, Cervera took part in expeditions mapping the hundreds of islands of the Philippine archipelago, which became useful to sailors navigating the area. In 1865 he returned to the Spanish homeland and got married.

Due to the political instability that persisted in Spain since Napoleon's invasion, Cervera took part in putting down the Cantonal rebellion during one of the Carlist Wars. He later commanded the schooner Circe and the corvette Santa Lucia back in the Philippines, where Cervera again took part in operations against insurgents. In 1876 the Spanish captain was appointed as the Governor of Jolo, although he later contracted malaria because of the conditions there and barely survived, returning to Madrid to report on the conditions in the Philippines shortly after that at the request of Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo. Cánovas asked Cervera to take up the post of Minister of the Navy, but Cervera refused, saying that he preferred to be at sea rather than at a desk job. In 1879, he was given command of the training corvette Ferolana, where he remained until 1882, when he was transferred to oversee the Cartagena naval base. From 1885 to 1890, he served on the shipbuilding commission of the battleship Pelayo and became its first commander, but had to fight against the bureaucratic procedures of the Spanish Navy that caused delays in her construction.

In the government
In May 1891, the Queen Regent María Cristina assigned Cervera to her court as her naval aide-de-camp. A year later the captain was assigned to oversee the construction of several cruisers for the Spanish Navy at the request of the Queen Regent. Around that time multiple politicians wanted Cervera to become the Minister of the Navy, but he continued to resist because he detested politics. Finally, in 1892, Prime Minister Práxedes Mateo Sagasta asked the Queen Regent to compel him to accept the position of naval minister in his government. She did so, and Cervera reluctantly accepted, being promoted to Contraalmirante (rear admiral). But the newly promoted flag officer made the prime minister promise to not lower the naval budget in return, which Mateo accepted. However, it was not long before the prime minister broke that promise and so Cervera resigned from the position in 1892, but not before trying to make efforts to improve the Spanish Navy's efficiency. The rear admiral was appointed as the naval attaché in London shortly afterwards, where he witnessed the technical innovations being made by the British Royal Navy, a post he held until the situation in Cuba began escalating around 1896–97.

Service in Cuba

The admiral viewed the escalation of tensions between the kingdom and the United States with alarm, as he believed their defeat would be inevitable in a war because of the U.S. Navy's advancements between 1892 and 1896. Cervera thought that the Spanish were unprepared and did not possess enough ships to defend their colonies. Nonetheless, he accepted the posting of commander of the Cuban squadron on 20 October 1897 and immediately organized training exercises to prepare the crews, since the last time naval drills had been carried out was 1884 (during tensions with the German Empire over the Caroline Islands). Cervera sought to correct the numerous deficiencies in the fleet within a short time period, including lack of training and inadequate supplies. He continued to face difficulties from the naval ministry of Admiral Segismundo Bermejo, however. After the explosion aboard the American battleship USS Maine (ACR-1) in Havana harbor in February 1898, the admiral sped back to Spain to speak to the government in person, but received orders from the Admiralty while at Cape Verde to take several ships back to Cuba and prepare for war, despite the severe problems in the fleet. Cervera returned to the Caribbean and slipped past American ships to enter the harbor Santiago de Cuba on May 19, despite several mishaps and having difficulties finding a port to refuel on coal, as most of the European countries with possessions in the Caribbean remained officially neutral. His total force included the cruisers SPANISH CRUISER Infanta Maria Teresa, SPANISH CRUISER Vizcaya, SPANISH CRUISER Almirante Oquendo, and SPANISH CRUISER Cristóbal Colón, along with two destroyers.

The U.S. remained unaware of the Spanish squadron's whereabouts for another several days, prior to it being discovered on May 28 or 29 at Santiago harbor by the Flying Squadron under Commodore Winfield Scott Schley. On May 31, the two sides exchanged fire, between the Cristóbal Colón and three American vessels (USS Iowa (BB-4), USS Massachusetts (BB-2), and USS New Orleans (CL-22)). After some time, Cervera ordered his squadron's cruiser to return to the harbor, with neither side having taken any damage. The rest of the North Atlantic Squadron under Rear Admiral William T. Sampson, operating in Cuban waters, did not arrive until June 1, and together the U.S. naval forces blockaded Cervera's squadron in Santiago. On June 2–3, the American commander decided to try to blockade the Spanish ships in the harbor by sinking a collier, the USS Merrimac (1894), at the entrance. However, it came under fire from the defenders and was forced aground, at which point the Spanish admiral personally met with its American crewmen, who were taken prisoner.

""¡Bien, muy bien! ¡Sois unos valientes! ¡Os felicito!" "Good, very good! You are brave! I congratulate you!""

- Spanish admiral Pascual Cervera congratulating the American prisoners after their failed attempt

Cervera later sent his chief of staff under a flag of truce to give a note to Admiral Sampson informing him that the collier's crew was alive and safe. It was an act that impressed his American opponents and Sampson later noted that the affair "gave us a favorable impression of the Spanish officers."

The fleet remained mostly inactive in harbor for the next month until July 2, when Ramón Blanco, the military governor of Cuba, gave orders for a sortie against the American blockade. Earlier, Admiral Cervera had argued with the authorities in Madrid against taking such an action, but Blanco settled the matter with his order. They formally departed on July 3. The U.S. fleet sounded the alarm at 9:31 in the morning on July 3. The approaching Spanish ships, with Cervera's flagship Infanta Maria Teresa leading the way, opened fire and engaged the U.S. fleet. They headed west while remaining near the coastline. The American battleships and cruisers pursued them as they made their way along the coast as the Spanish admiral's flagship sustained heavy damage from them. With their engines damaged, Cervera decided to ground the Infanta Maria Teresa, which they did at 10:15 am. Around 10:20, the Almirante Oquendo was forced out of action with heavy damage and grounded. The two destroyers, SPANISH DESTROYER Plutón and SPANISH DESTROYER Furor, put up a fight before also the former ran aground and the latter was sunk by 10:30 am.

As the admiral's flagship raised a white flag on the beach, the remaining two cruisers – Vizcaya and Colón – were pursued, with the former being destroyed around 11:00 while the latter made it fifty miles from Santiago before being grounded on a beach. After that, the American ships began rescue operations for the Spanish sailors of the destroyed squadron, and among those captured from the wreck of the Infanta Maria Teresa was Admiral Cervera. That afternoon, he made it onto the USS Iowa, where he and the other Spanish officers met with Captain Robley D. Evans and formally surrendered to them. Afterwards, Cervera and the rest of the captured prisoners were sent to Annapolis, where they were free to roam the U.S. Naval Academy and were greeted with cheers by Americans. The New York Times reported that he appeared to be "much affected by the genuineness and spontaneity of the feeling manifested." On August 20, he was offered freedom by the U.S. government on the condition that he would not take up arms against the United States, but he refused, saying that accepting conditional freedom was illegal by Spanish law, and did not return to Spain until September 1898. He gained popularity among both the Spanish and American public in the years after the war.

Later life
In February 1901, Cervera was promoted to Vizealmirante (vice admiral) and in December 1902 became the Chief of Staff of the Navy. In May of the following year, King Alfonso XIII of Spain named him a senator of the kingdom for life. By 1906, his health was failing and Cervera was reassigned to manage the naval district of Ferrol before retiring the next year. He died on 3 April 1909.

Personal life
Admiral Cervera was married and had several children, but he lived his private life with a rigid schedule. One of his sons was also in the Spanish Navy and served with his father at Santiago.

Cervera also spoke fluent English.

Recognition
Admiral Cervera continued to be a popular figure in the years following his death, to the point that even the Spanish Navy acknowledged him as a symbol of patriotism by naming a light cruiser after him.

Awards

 * 🇪🇸 Spain
 * ESP Isabella Catholic Order COM.svg Order of Isabella the Catholic
 * Placa de la Real y Militar Orden de San Hermenegildo.svg Royal and Military Order of Saint Hermenegild
 * Spanish Grand Cross of Naval Merit Ribbon.png Naval Merit Grand Cross
 * Cruz del Mérito Naval con distintivo blanco.png Naval Merit Cross with white badge
 * Cruz del Mérito Naval con distintivo rojo.png Naval Merit Cross with red badge
 * 🇫🇷 France
 * Legion Honneur Chevalier ribbon.svg Legion of Honor

title: Pascual Cervera y Topete


text:
Box kite

A box kite is a high-performance kite, noted for developing relatively high lift; it is a type within the family of cellular kites. The typical design has four parallel struts. The box is made rigid with diagonal crossed struts. There are two sails, or ribbons, whose width is about a quarter of the length of the box. The ribbons wrap around the ends of the box, leaving the ends and middle of the kite open. In flight, one strut is the bottom, and the bridle is tied between the top and bottom of this strut. The dihedrals of the sails help stability.

The box kite was invented in 1893 by Lawrence Hargrave, an English-born Australian, as part of his attempt to develop a manned flying machine. Hargrave linked several of his box kites (Hargrave cells) together, creating sufficient lift for him to fly some 16 ft (4.9 m) off the ground. A winged development of this kite is known as the Cody kite following its development by Samuel Franklin Cody. Military uses also involved a kite/radio transmitter combination issued to pilots during World War II for use in liferafts.

Large box kites are constructed as cellular kites. Rather than one box, there are many, each with its own set of sails.

Most of the altitude records for kite flying are held by large box kites, with Dacron sails, flown with Spectra cable. However in 2014 Robert Moore and a team of kite experts flew a 12 sq metre DT delta to 16,009 ft above their launch point. The location of the flights was near Cobar in Western NSW, Australia. While this was primarily a triangular winged delta kite, it has a triangular box centre cell for additional stability. Future attempts on either the single kite record or multiple kite record (trained), may use Hargrave box kites or a variant. Before Dacron, Spectra, and Kevlar were available, high performance box kites used oiled silk, linen or hemp sails, and were flown with steel cable. Silk, linen and hemp were used because they could be spun finer than cotton and stretched relatively little when wet. Steel had the highest available strength for its weight. After Hargrave invented the box kite, weather stations from around the world saw the potential for his design. Blue hill observatory and the German weather station at Lindenberg used kites routinely until weather balloons took over in the 1920s and 1930s.

title: Box kite