Intersection Logs

Here's the Sun in 171 Angstroms today:



and here's how it looked a year ago:



That's the solar cycle (finally!) in action.

I've been spending a lot of time lately looking at data from very early in the life of SDO, when sunspots were few and far between, and it's startling to look at the current Sun -- now sporting the most sunspots so far this cycle -- and see how much things have changed.

The Sun has been pretty active this week. The highlight was an X2.2 flare on the 15th (that's a big one, though still less than a tenth of the size of the monster flares of late October 2003; the biggest so far this cycle by quite a margin.) There might be aurora tonight even here -- though it'll probably too cloudy and/or moonlit to see much.






Below the cut is yesterday's APOD (2kx2k pix), showing the flare at the 193 Angstrom wavelength as seem by AIA.
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The images at the Sun Today site look a little odd the last few days, but it's not something wrong with the instrument -- just an aesthetic choice in need of some fine tuning, as far as I can tell, that's currently making most of the colorized images look overexposed. The FITS versions look fine. I think I approve the choice to ditch the cherry-pink for the 304 images in favor of orange, anyway.

Live! Local! Late-Breaking!

The SDO/AIA team are making current solar images available. I'm not sure how often they're updated, but the stuff below the cut is supposed to link to the most recent image. (There are other wavelengths, but these are my favorites. 171 for pretty loops and flares, 335 for erupting prominences, continuum for sunspots. And 1700, which is UV continuum from the upper photosphere, because it's a novelty to me.)

( Cut to avoid friend-page breakage in case of table coding problems, and to spare everybody's bandwidth. )

No, there's really not much point in sitting here at stupid a.m. waiting for the poor neglected daemons of the old and mostly superseded data system to serve me up the data with which I am not really awake enough to deal at the moment. (You know the old saw about the problem with standards?)

Shiny new embargoed data is getting unveiled in a NASA press conference at 2.15pm EDT on Wednesday, which is not actually tomorrow any more except possibly in Hawaii. It would be nice to be somewhat awake to enjoy that.

Unofficial launch video.

Official launch video.

I'm still somewhat bemused by the whole rubber-chicken aspect of the SDO public outreach effort. There's even a rubber-chicken's-eye view YouTube video of the meeting I was at in Stanford in September. (And yes, I wandered into shot a couple of times, and no, I'm not going to link to it.)

More seriously, some nice launch photos are available at Kennedy Space Center's media archive.. I suspect some of those are going to show up as wallpaper on no few solar scientists' computers for a while.

If I'd remembered that banana bread needs nearly an hour in the oven, I might have started on it earlier than 9pm. It's been a while since I did any baking, but this is something of a special occasion. Weather permitting, around 10.26 ET tomorrow, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory is due to be launched from Kennedy Space Center aboard an Atlas rocket. There's a better than even chance it'll end up slipping another day, but still. We've been waiting for this for years, so one more day doesn't make much difference. We're planning a small breakfast gathering in the conference room, with NASA TV streaming on the big screen, and I seem to have elected myself to bring goodies. If the launch does slip, I may have to do it again tomorrow, in which case I'll have to stop off for more eggs and sugar on the way home.