SDO Image is Number 1 in SpaceShots

It is always nice to see an SDO image as the number 1 in a top 10 list. Fox News selected the "whip" filament as the top image in early September.

Fall Eclipse Season has Begun

Today was the beginning of the Fall 2012 eclipse season. This image in AIA 171 shows that the Earth covered about half of the Sun this morning at 0700 UTC.
With the SDO geosynchronous orbit comes an eclipse season twice each year. They last for several weeks; this will end on September 26 (just in time for our next maneuver).

Images are Once Again Available

The database update at the JSOC has ended and data is once again flowing to the right places.

Temporary outage of browse data

The Stanford site is undergoing database maintenance mid-day on September 4. Unfortunately, browse data will not be available during this period.

Time for Prominences and Filaments

When I checked the kiosk movies today I saw that the edge of the Sun is ringed by prominences. And the face of the Sun is littered with filaments. If you check out the kiosk movie in the 304 band, you will an enormous eruption at 2 o'clock, quiescent prominences at 3, 5, and 7 o'clock, another eruption at 8 o'clock, and something interesting at 10 o'clock. With the 15-minute cadence of the kiosk you see flickering on the face as filaments erupt and move into space. A few small C-class flares happened over the weekend, but the prominence and filaments were the real show over the Labor Day weekend.

Happy Space Weather Day!

Today is the 154th anniversary of the Carrington event. A large flare was observed on the Sun and a magnetic disturbance was seen to happen soon after. It was the largest space weather event ever observed.
To honor this observation, I think we should name September 1 as Space Weather Day!
For the more mathematically inclined, 154 is a sphenic number, a product of three distinct prime numbers (154 = 2 x 7 x 11). Other sphenic numbers are 30 (2 x 3 x 5) and 42 (2 x 3 x 7).

The Mantis Shrimp: A Miniature SDO?

SDO takes pictures of the Sun in many wavelengths and uses the polarization of the light to measure the magnetic field of the Sun. Then we are forced to rely on the human eye to look at our images. The human eye uses three color sensors to see millions of colors. We don’t see polarized light any different than non-polarized without special sunglasses. Polarized light has the light waves moving in one direction. Glare is light moving side-to-side so sunglasses that let light through that is moving up and down can keep glare out of your eyes. But we usually don't worry about polarized light.

Is there an eye that could better enjoy SDO images? Yes! The mantis shrimp.

These arthropods have up to 12 different color sensors and can see light from the ultraviolet to the infrared (see an amazing closeup of the eyes at the National Geographic.) Two channels see shapes and the rest look at colors. One set of eye cells can measure the polarization of the light. They can see about 10 times more colors over a wider range of wavelengths than humans.

Rather than the 3-color composites we now display (such as this one from today), we could display AIA and HMI images in a 12-color display. A mantis shrimp might enjoy watching for flares and coronal mass ejections!

We don’t understand why a mantis shrimp needs this optical equipment. They live in the brightly colored tropical oceans. Maybe they need to see the differences between friend, foe, and food. Some fish glow in ultraviolet light, perhaps that is another signal the shrimp watch for. The polarized light might reveal semi-transparent fish to a hungry mantis shrimp. Sounds like they have their own real-time feature finding team built into their eyes.

Perhaps we could adapt the multi-wavelength viewing used by the mantis shrimp to find out what is happening on the Sun.

Check out the July 30, 2012 episode of RadioLab to hear more about how different animals see color.