View all stories where this data set is used The horizontal 'extension' in the image is called 'blooming' and is due to a charge leakage along the readout wires in the CCD imager in the camera. The planet Mercury is visible as the bright point moving left of the Sun. Stars are seen to drift slowly to the right, carried by the relative motion of the Sun and the Earth.

Some of these launch particle events which can saturate the cameras with snow-like artifacts.Īlso visible in the coronagraphs are stars and planets. Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are occasionally observed launching from the Sun. Protons and other ionized atoms are there as well, but are not as visible since they do not interact with photons as strongly as electrons. The bright white regions are visible due to their high density of free electrons which scatter the light from the photosphere towards the observer.

Long streamers radiate outward from the Sun and wave gently due to their interaction with the solar wind. This movie covers a two week period in October and November 2003 which exhibited some of the largest solar activity events since the advent of space-based solar observing.Īs the movie plays, we can observe a number of features of the active Sun. In this movie, the inner coronagraph (designated C2) is combined with the outer coronagraph (C3). The corona is visible to the SOHO/LASCO coronagraph instruments, which block the bright disk of the Sun so the significantly fainter corona can be seen. Here is a view of the solar disk in 195 Å ultraviolet light (colored green in this movie) and the Sun's extended atmosphere, or corona, (blue and white in this movie). This is a 1024x1024 pixel version of solar storms providing a more complete view of the SOHO/LASCO/C3 field-of-view.

Wave 11 complete