Wikimedia's Picture of the Year 2012: Second Place

Second Place

On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun's atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled at over 900 miles per second. The CME did not travel directly toward Earth, but did connect with Earth's magnetic environment, or magnetosphere, causing aurora to appear on the night of Monday, September 3. Pictured here is a lighten blended version of the 304 and 171 angstrom wavelengths.

Links / Resources:
Wikimedia:  commons.wikimedia.org/Picture_of_the_Year_2012
SDO Gallery: sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery
The Sun Now: sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data
SDO Browse Data: sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/browse

Data Pipeline is Down

The SDO Data Pipeline has had an anomaly and is currently off-line. It should be back up soon.

Spring 2013 Eclipse Season has Begun

March 2, 2013 saw the first eclipse of the SDO Spring 2013 Eclipse Season. It was a partial eclipse, blocking only the upper left part of the Sun. Here are images from two AIA channels showing the eclipse at around 0715 UTC yesterday. The 193 image on the left shows the highly structured corona with the Earth passing by. The right shows the 1600 bandpass a few minutes later. The 1600 image has a much more uniform flow on the surface of the Sun and a much sharper (though still a little fuzzy) edge of the Earth. There is also a crescent of darkness over the top of the Sun that is not related to the eclipse.

The 2013 Eclipse Season continues until March 26. This season also has a lunar transit on March 11, from 1135-1243 UTC, a momentum management burn at 1901 UTC on March 13, and a station keeping burn at 2339 UTC on March 20.

Looks like March is going to be a busy month!

Data Processing Lag (Update)

This afternoon all is repaired. The back-filling of images will progress as the data fills in. The data partition on SDO's Data Delivery System storage area network went down this morning. DDS core processing and delivery of files to the SOC stopped at around 0610 UTC (01:10 am ET). The Front End Processor servers will store all of the data downlinked while the DDS is down. This data will be replayed into the core and delivered to the SOCs once normal operations resume. We are working to recover at this time, and normal operations should resume in a few hours.

Northern Lights at Nordic Cool 2013

This Saturday at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, Norwegian solar physicist Pål Brekke will describe the Northern Lights in a literature panel at Nordic Cool 2013. His panel, The Secret Behind the Northern Lights, is 10:30 AM Saturday, March 2, 2013, in the Terrace Gallery. In this interactive session, Dr. Brekke will use photos and video footage from NASA satellites to discuss the Northern Lights.

Later that day, innovative Danish lighting designer Jesper Kongshaug will recreate the effect of the Northern Lights on all four sides of the Kennedy Center's façade from 5:30 to 11 p.m.

For more information, go to the Nordic Cool 2013 website hosted by the Kennedy Center.

Sliding and Popping

In just 14 hours two active regions not far apart popped off numerous, relatively minor, flares (seen as bright flashes), while a pair of filaments above the Sun’s edge sent elongated steams of plasma back and forth between the two of them (Feb. 20, 2013).  The filaments are suspended by magnetic forces. The close-up combination made for an intriguing video clip.  The images were taken in extreme ultraviolet light of Helium. 

SDO Launched Three Years Ago

Three years ago, the Solar Dynamics Observatory was launched into orbit atop an Atlas V rocket. Here is a NASA video showing the launch and the amazing waves that rippled away from the rocket has we passed through a sundog. We were launched to "learn why our star is changing our lives." Since then we have been busy doing that. SDO data is helping us understand how the million-Kelvin corona is heated, letting us watch magnetic recombination take place, and understand how the magnetic field creates solar activity. Our data has been examined by people around the world, using the SDO websites and HelioViewer. 

SDO is a great mission and we look forward to the next year of spectacular data!