Multi-Sun Composition

  • Released Thursday, December 18, 2008

This movie is a composition of multiple solar datasets synchronized in time. The time frame is late October and early November of 2003, the time of some record-breaking solar activity.

The background of the movie shows the view of the wide-angle coronagraphs (blue/white), or LASCO instruments, aboard SOHO. They show streams of electrons outbound from the Sun, part of the solar atmosphere. The central green image is the Sun in ultraviolet light from the EIT instrument. Note that flashes of solar flares in the ultraviolet quickly propagate out from the Sun and are visible in LASCO. These events are coronal mass ejections, or CMEs.

Overlaid on the upper left is a better view of the EIT ultraviolet image at a wavelength of 195 angstroms (19.5 nanometers).

On the lower left, the orange movie is the EIT ultraviolet movie at 304 angstroms (30.4 nanometers).

On the upper right is a solar magnetogram, taken by the MDI instrument. The white regions correspond to positive (north) magnetic flux and the dark regions to negative (south) magnetic flux.

The colors for the sequences above are not real. They are chosen by convention since the properties recorded by the cameras are not visible to the human eye.

The final image on the lower right is also from MDI. It is a combination of several optical wavelengths and is the best representation from SOHO of the Sun in visible light, as we would see it through ground-based telescopes.

The movies that are part of this composition are also available individually on the SVS site:



Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

Release date

This page was originally published on Thursday, December 18, 2008.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, October 9, 2024 at 3:37 PM EDT.


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Datasets used

Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.