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.
