The millionth movie was of one hour’s worth of data from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on SDO, focusing on this small but fast ejection from the Sun.

This led to a faint and extended coronal mass ejection seen in LASCO C2.

The coronal mass ejection was noticed in many different online catalogs of features and events in the Sun, but the original eruption was not. This is an example of how users are finding events on the Sun which are sometimes overlooked.

Just before the millionth movie, someone made this movie of one week of solar activity. This movie shows many different flares and eruptions of all sizes over the course of a week. Also, about 10 seconds into the movie (beginning around 2013-04-17 16:30 UT), you can see that black edges appear on all sides of the field of view. This is caused by the SDO spacecraft pointing slightly away from the center of the Sun for short periods of time. SDO does this to enable measurements of the AIA and HMI detectors. These measurements are a regular and normal part of running the AIA and HMI instruments, and allow us to keep track of the degradation of the detectors.

We’ll be adding new functionality and datasets to the Helioviwer Project in the next few months. We are committed to making it easy for everyone everywhere to explore the Sun and inner heliosphere, in the way you want. We hope that you continue to enjoy using Helioviewer.org and Jhelioviewer. If you have any ideas on how we can improve our service, please let us know.

Finally we’d like to thank the many NASA, ESA and JAXA funded organizations that have made the Helioviewer Project possible.

Thanks!

We apologize for the interruption to Helioviewer services, and we thank you for your patience.

Thanks,

Helioviewer Team.

Today, starting at 1315 UTC (8:15 am ET), SDO will execute the EVE Field of View maneuver followed by the HMI/AIA Flatfield at 1630 UTC (11:30 am ET). During these maneuvers the science data will be interrupted. These maneuvers and last weeks’ Delta-H thruster firing were flipped in the schedule published earlier.

Instruments can degrade in the harsh environment of space, and so it is important to calibrate at regular intervals to make sure that we have the best data available at all times. SDO therefore occasionally makes special maneuvers that enable the measurements to be made that can be used to help calibrate the instruments onboard. Whilst these maneuvers are going on, some of the AIA and SDO images may look unusual.

SDO has three instruments onboard: AIA, HMI and the Extreme Ultraviolet Experiment, EVE. The EVE instrument is designed to measure the solar extreme ultraviolet (EUV) irradiance. The EUV radiation includes the 0.1-105 nm range, which provides the majority of the energy for heating Earth’s thermosphere and creating Earth’s ionosphere (charged plasma). The majority of EVE data are time-series of measurements of the spectral content of solar extreme ultraviolet irradiance, although some low spatial resolution x-ray images are also taken by the EVE Solar Aspect Monitor (SAM) instrument (see the example below). EVE gives us lots of information on the spectral content of the Sun’s radiation changes with time, which is very important for understanding the Earth-Sun connection.

Eclipse first contact begins at approximately 20:36 UT on November 13 and continues until approximately 23:48 UT on November 13. Live streaming of the eclipse is available at http://www.ustream.tv/cairnseclipse2012. Please go to

http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEmono/TSE2012/TSE2012.html

for many more details concerning this eclipse. An interactive map is available here.

The downtime was caused by a problem encountered while expanding our storage capacity, which has since been fixed.

We are currently in the process of restoring images from some earlier years and as a result certain images may not be accessible over the next couple days.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.