Coronal Loops are Nice to Look At!

As Solar Cycle 25 starts becoming more active, coronal loops have become more common and beautiful. Here is a movie from June 24, 2021, showing the decaying remnants of AR 12833 rotating off the Sun in the upper right and the just-forming AR 12835 rotating into view in the lower left. You can see small filaments in and around the two active regions, with a very nice filament liftoff in the area following AR 12833.
There are many filaments visible around the limb of the Sun. In the lower left, around 7:30, you can see what looks like a coronal cavity (a filament surrounded by a dark, more-or-less circular, region.

Solar Cycle 25 is looking good!

SDO Stamps are on Sale!

USPS Forever stamps featuring SDO images were released by the Post Office on Friday in a ceremony at the Greenbelt, Maryland, Post Office. The stamps have 10 SDO images in each set:

The Summer Solstice (Northen Hemisphere) occurred at 11:32 pm ET yesterday (June 20, 2021). Celebrate the solstice with SDO Stamps. Send someone the Sun!

Guidance System Calibrations Yesterday

Yesterday, June 16, 2021, from 1700-2000 UTC (1-4pm ET), SDO ran calibration maneuvers for the pointing system. These tests were to restart one of the inertial reference units and then a roll of the satellite to help refine some of the parameters in the Kalman filter. During this time science data may be missing or blurry. The tests were successful and will help maintain SDO's pointing accuracy for years to come.

My congratulations to the Flight Operations Team for completing an excellent set of calibration maneuvers!

A Week of Infrastructure Repairs!

This week is a busy week for people making repairs of SDO-related infrastructure.

On Tuesday, 8 June 2021, the fiber optics linking the SDO ground station and the SDO JSOC in Palo Alto, CA, will be disconnected and relocated. This work is scheduled to start at noon MT and to take about 2 hours but could last as long as 6 hours. During this time the AIA and HMI data will be unavailable. The automatic replay option will fill in the data once the repairs are complete.

The NASA building housing the SDO servers will undergo infrastructure maintenance 12-13 June 2021. This will require us to shutdown our servers over that weekend, which means the website and data will not be available. The servers will be powered down Friday evening (June 11, 5 pm ET) and powered up Monday morning (June 14).

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience these repairs may cause.