Happy New Year 2013!

As we begin another year, how about a disk problem? It appears that the SDO webserver didn't change smoothly to 2013. It will be fixed as soon as possible. 

Holiday Greetings from the SDO Team

Happy Holidays from the SDO Team. Thanks for making SDO images appear all around the globe. From looking at comets to the Transit of Venus, we are glad the data is so useful.

The past year has seen an explosion in the science output of SDO! We look forward to many more years of studying the Sun's magnetic field.

We also made the cover of Jan/Feb 2013 issue of Discovery magazine. Look for it!

One Year Since Comet Lovejoy's Perihelion

It has been one year since Comet Lovejoy was watched by SDO, STEREO, and Hinode as it passed by the Sun. Each spacecraft provided unique observations we had not anticipated when they were built and launched. Hinode took an image of the coma in reflected sodium light. SDO and STEREO provided images in the EUV that we continue to analyze. Here is one picture from the movie comet_swoosh_171.mp4 on the SDO Comet Lovejoy Event Page. The streaks across the path of the comet have become the fascinating part of the comet tail.

In the past year we have figured out one way the comet tail can be bright in the solar corona. (Check out the paper at the Physics ArXiv site.) But we still don't know how the solar magnetic field affects (and is affected by) the comet as it moves through. All of that stuff coming off the comet makes the field shake, can we learn something from that? The brightness of the comet debris comes from running into electrons in the corona. Can we learn about the number of electrons in the corona?

We need even bigger sun-grazing comets!

Since Comet Lovejoy we have had only one alert to look for a comet in SDO and we saw nothing. But Comet ISON is due on Thanksgiving Day next year. It was acquired out near Jupiter, which usually means it is a big comet. As it moves toward the Sun, people are watching to see if stays bright. If it does we will be in for quite a show. Comet Lovejoy came in from the south and was seen only in the southern hemisphere. Comet ISON is coming in from the north and could be visible from the United States both inbound and outbound. Comet ISON will also pass through the corona a little farther out than did Comet Lovejoy, 1.2 million km (1.9 million miles) above the Sun's surface.

It would be like fireworks on Thanksgiving!

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.

SDO Website is back up

The SDO website is back up and running.