100 Million Images from SDO

The three science investigations of SDO have taken over 100 million images of the Sun. This corresponds to 3 Petabytes (3000 Terabytes) of raw, uncompressed data.

That's a lot of Dopplergrams, EUV images, magnetograms, and spectra of the Sun!

Congratulations to the science investigation teams for handling this data and making it available to solar scientists and the public.

Delta-H Maneuver Today

SDO executed a Delta-H maneuver today. The thrusters were fired for 33 seconds at 1751 UTC (1251 ET) to keep the reaction wheels spinning at the correct rates.

SDO in a Music Video, No Lunar Transit Next Week

There is a video on Youtube claiming that SDO will see a partial solar eclipse next week related to the total solar eclipse happening November 13. This is not correct. According to the SDO projections the Moon will not be closer than 2 degrees from the Sun next week.

SDO sees what we call that a lunar transit when it watches the Moon pass in front of the Sun. Lunar transits are important because of the campfire effect. What happens when you are feeling nice and toasty sitting by a campfire on a cold night and someone walks between you and the fire? You quickly feel cold! It is the same for our solar instruments. They are staring at the Sun and all of the sudden the Moon blocks some of the heat. We must use heaters to keep the instruments operating correctly. We plan quite far ahead for these transits.

No transit this month!

SDO images are included in a new performance called Unfolding Space by Yuval Avital. You can see the Trebuchet Prominence Eruption at 1:30 into the video. Some of the music is sonified HMI data provided by A. Kosovichev at Stanford University.