Ka-boom

[ellarien]

I wouldn't have pegged active region 11093 as "most likely to produce an M-class flare," but it did. It will be interesting to see what the subsurface flows looked like -- and with the HMI pipeline cranking away, we should have some preliminary indications on that in a couple of weeks.

Comments

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Is the very long afterglow in http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/dailymov/2010/08/07/20100807_EVE_daily.mp4 something physical or a saturation effect on the X-ray detector?

Does the satellite notice flares and switch to higher cadence?

The flare goes amazingly bright in http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/dailymov/2010/08/07/20100807_1024_0094.mpg and seems to have the arch structure nicely resolved in http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/dailymov/2010/08/07/20100807_1024_0171.mpg

[ellarien]

Well spotted on the afterglow -- apparently there is a real effect, as described here on the EVE site. This seems to have been a long flare, though -- even on the GOES X-ray the decay takes several hours. I don't think the cadence changes, but I'm not very familiar with that instrument -- I know AIA runs at fixed (if slightly irregular) cadence.

The AIA 171 is my favourite for seeing the loop structure -- it's usually pretty even when the Sun is "quiet."