Everyone’s abuzz about what SDO is watching this morning: a huge solar prominence and filament wrapping partway around the southwestern hemisphere of the Sun, literally hundreds of thousands of miles long! This is a section of the latest image from SDO’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) 304 camera, which best captures details about the sun’s outer…
Tag: solar
A Sinuous Strand
Featured on the Solar Dynamics Observatory’s Pick of the Week, this image from the observatory’s AIA 304 camera shows a gigantic filament snaking around the Sun’s southern hemisphere, hundreds of thousands of miles of magnetically-contained plasma made visible in extreme ultraviolet light. Filaments are bands of relatively cooler, denser solar material caught up in magnetic…
Just Passing By
Holy lunar photobomb, Batman! In another brief occultation event the Moon snuck in front of SDO’s cameras on Saturday, November 6, this time passing across the orbiting observatory’s view of the Sun’s southern pole and southeastern limb in a diagonal motion. This happened previously on October 7… seems like the Moon doesn’t much like being…
It’s (Not) the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
Good grief! What a cool image this is: the Sun as photographed by Alan Friedman in hydrogen alpha light. The detail in the surface (photosphere) is simply amazing, especially considering the image was taken with a backyard telescope (albeit a very fancy backyard telescope!) Click the image to go to Alan’s page where you can…
The Sun and the Moon
From an SDO image chosen as the Pick of the Week for October 15th, this shot is almost too cool to be real…but it is! As the New Moon passed between the Solar Dynamics Observatory and the Sun, the spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit got a view of the Moon’s silhouetted disc passing across its normally-unobstructed…
Pillar of Fire
Ok it’s not fire, it’s plasma, but it’s nevertheless a wonderful image by space photographer Alan Friedman showing a coronal ejection towering over 200,000 miles above the surface of the sun. It was taken on July 27, 2010. Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) occur when particularly large magnetic loops filled with plasma “snap” and expel their…
Solar Maelstrom
A powerful sunspot creates a spinning whirlpool of magnetic activity around itself in this detail from an SDO image (AIA 304) taken today, June 24. Sunspots are darker areas on the sun’s surface (photosphere) where a “bubble” of magnetic fields have risen from the interior and “pushed aside” the hotter layers at the surface to…
As The Day Is Long
Happy Summer Solstice! A this is the day that the Earth’s northern hemisphere receives the longest amount of sunlight during the course of the year, I thought it only appropriate to feature a pic of the Sun! Above is a detail from a high-resolution image taken today by the Solar Dynamics Observatory showing some very…
Coronal Loops
Seen in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths, bright coronal loops erupt from the edges of a sunspot in this image, a detail of a larger image captured by the SDO spacecraft earlier today. (Click to see the full-sized version.) Coronal loops are plasma-filled “tubes” that arc upwards from the Sun’s surface and reconnect at both ends. They…
Ultra Magnetism
Revealed in extreme ultraviolet light, our sun’s looping magnetic field lines are visible (watch in HD!) in this video from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite. The action spans a two-day period from June 6 – 7, 2010, and features two particularly magnetically-active regions on the sun’s surface. Superheated solar material is caught up in…
Journey Into The Sun
Here’s a very informative segment about the Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft (now offering continuously updating views of the Sun!) from KQED, the Northern California Public Broadcasting channel. Enjoy!
Showing Some Flare
After weeks of waiting patiently, the first images are finally here! This video shows an arching prominence erupting from the surface of the Sun on March 30, 2010, as seen by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in beautiful IMAX-quality high resolution. (By the way, AIA stands for Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, one of the three main tools…
Lights in the Dark 