Solar Facts and Space Weather
A very long solar filament that had been snaking around the Sun erupted (Dec. 6, 2010) with a flourish. STEREO (Behind) caught the action in dramatic detail in extreme ultraviolet light of Helium. It had been almost a million km long (about half a solar radius) and a prominent feature on the Sun visible over [...]
The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory or SOHO is by many accounts the granddaddy of modern solar astronomy. SOHO is not the first space based solar observatory but it has truly ushered in a golden age for solar physics. The mission had a primary science phase of 2 years and a overall mission lifetime of 5 [...]
A giant filament on the sun produced a small eruption and flare.
The STEREO (Ahead) spacecraft caught this tumultuous solar prominence as it twisted and turned over about 18 hours, as seen in profile above the Sun?s surface, before disappearing (Oct. 8, 2010). The cloud of cooler gases, suspended by magnetic forces, is seen here in extreme ultraviolet wavelength at about 60,000 degrees C. Other plasma also [...]
Around 3:30 UT on October 6, 2010 a filament erupted in the northeast part of the solar disk (upper left area). Moving at around 375 km/s (850,000 miles per hour) the CME combined with the ambient solar wind then over Oct. 10-11, 2010 the earth experienced a glancing blow. As a result a minor geomagnetic [...]
A filament erupted in the NE area of the sun. The eruption was observed by SDO and the associated Halo CME was seen by SOHO’s C2 and C3 coronagraphs. SDO is currently in eclipse season so during this event the earth moved between SDO and the sun, moving across the sun for a few minutes.
Thursday morning seemed to take longer to arrive. Expectations were certainly higher, based in no small part on the fact that most of us had flights booked to take us home later that day. Washington DC had just gotten its second massive snow storm in less than a week, adding another foot of snow to [...]
Solar sunspot group, active region (AR) 11109, is rotating out of view over the western limb of the sun. As it was moving out of the view of the earth and SDO it produced a C-class (C2.3) solar flare at 16:38 UT, October 4th. This video first shows the flare observed by the Solar Dynamics [...]
Our good friends and colleagues at Trinity College Dublin have created a 3D visualization of the propagation of a coronal mass ejection (CME). Using multiscale image processing and 3D visualization the team reconstructed the trajectory of an earth-directed CME observed by the STEREO spacecraft. Their work has directly shown the complicated nature of a CME’s [...]
Just as sunspot group AR11105 rotated out of the Earth’s view it produced a spectacular show. A large prominence erupted along with a C3 solar flare and a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) blasted away from the sun. This great show was captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) as well as the Solar and Heliospheric [...]
