HONG KONG, China — “Sun Outage” is a phrase that means something to someone working in the Satellite and Television Industries.

When you are sitting at home watching television, there is a good chance that the CNN on your screen has traveled around the world via satellites. These satellites are geo-stationary, which means they hover over the same piece of Earth all the time, in fact they are rotating at the same speed as the Earth to achieve this.

A ‘sun outage’ is similar to a solar eclipse – when the moon blocks out the daytime sun – except this time that pesky sun gets behind our satellite.

The satellites we use are effectively giant reflectors of radio waves that carry our television signals. The radio waves get sent from one part of the world and reflected back to another part of the world, often ending up in another continent. Typically space is a quiet place. However, the sun is a very noisy thing, emitting all sorts of radio wavelengths at high amplitude.

Thus, when the sun gets behind our satellite - albeit only for a few minutes a year (and we just finished our last sun outage period on Thursday) – it swamps all the radio waves with its solar noise. So we, along with others, lose our signal in that noise.

It is a bit like trying to have a conversation with your friend in front of a set of rock concert speakers - deafening and impossible to hear anything. Anyway, if your picture goes on the blink and you hear the phrase ‘sun outage’ then sit tight, make a cup of tea and do not adjust your set.

Normal service will resume when our lovely sun meanders on.