At 8:11 a.m. UT (3:11 am EDT) this morning the Sun unleashed a huge solar flare. Rated an X6.9, it was the most powerful flare of the current solar cycle… so strong, in fact, that some high-frequency radio blackouts were experienced here on Earth shortly after. It was three times stronger than the X2.2 February…
Category: sun
Solar Explosion!
Can’t see the video below? Click here. Early this morning – at around 2am EDT – the Sun’s southern hemisphere belched out a truly gigantic plume of material, insofar as I have never seen anything like it in any of the images or videos captured by SDO to date! This really is the definition of…
SDO: Year One
Can’t see the video below? Click here. One year ago today, on April 21, 2010, NASA held a First Light press conference where the first images from the Solar Dynamics Observatory were presented to the public! Now here we are one year later and the images and video we have enjoyed these past 12 months…
Happy SUN Day, April 17th!
It’s Global Astronomy Month’s Sun Day – an astronomical appreciation of the beauty of our parent star! In keeping with global astronomy month, it’s time to get out and enjoy another favorite astronomical target – the Sun! It’s a star that can be seen from both hemispheres and a great way to involve your friends,…
Afternoon Delight
I spotted this on the SDO site late this afternoon…it shows an eruption of plasma from the Sun’s photosphere that stretches out many tens of thousands of miles…the Earth could easily fit many times over beneath the looping structure! This image is from about 5pm EDT (21:59 UT), and shows the eastern limb of the Sun,…
There Goes The Sun
The Sun was briefly slashed in half diagonally when Earth’s atmosphere hid it from the view of NASA’s SDO spacecraft on April 1, 2011. (No foolin’!) SDO is currently in an orbit that puts the Earth between it and the Sun momentarily each day. When this happens, SDO’s view is blocked completely for several minutes…
Sun Pass
Astronomy hobbyist and solar photographer extraordinaire Alan Friedman captured a wonderful image of the International Space Station transiting the edge of the Sun’s disc during a Winter Star Party in Florida on March 1, 2011. Taken with a solar telescope that images the Sun in hydrogen alpha light, the image above clearly shows the ISS…
Detachable Prominence
Here’s the latest image of the Sun from photographer Alan Friedman, showing incredible surface detail as well as the remnants of a detached prominence that had erupted from active region 1166 on March 3, 2011. This image was taken during a Winter Star Party event in West Summerland Key, Florida. “A close-up look at the…
Active region is active.
Active region 1163-1164 kept the show going this morning, February 27 2011, with a large coronal mass ejection (CME) that erupted at around 4:30am EST from the Sun’s western limb. The animation above was made from ten high-resolution images taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, and shows this particular flare in action. (Click the image…
Flare Out
Today at 7:35 UT, hours before the final Discovery shuttle launch, the Sun had a launch of its own: an M3-class solar flare spewed a giant plume of material hundreds of thousands of miles into space. Luckily this ejection was not facing Earth at the time, but the active region responsible is gradually rotating into…
A Matter of Scale
One of the things that fascinates me so much about the Universe is the incredible vastness of scale, distance and size. On Earth we have virtually nothing to compare to the kinds of sizes seen in space. We look up at the stars and planets in the night sky but they are just bright points…
The Sun’s Still At It!
‘Tis the season…the season for solar activity, that is! Last week was just the beginning, even though it saw some of the most powerful solar flares of the past four years send charged solar particles streaming toward Earth. Luckily our magnetosphere was in such a position to absorb much of it, creating some beautiful aurora…
Lights in the Dark 