What happened? Well, there was an eruption on the back side of the Sun, that caused a propagating disturbance in the solar atmosphere. that appears to have triggered a prominence lift-off on the front-side of the Sun. This is a great example of how the high cadence, continuous observations from Solar Dynamics Observatory give us a much better view of how distant parts of the Sun can physically influence each other. We liked this event so much we made and uploaded some movies of our own. The lower cadence of these movies allows you to see the swaying of coronal material in response to the disturbance from the initial eruption.

Thanks to danielchangck for sharing this movie with other users of Helioviewer.org.

Thanks to sedge2002 for making this movie and sharing it with other users of Helioviewer.org. As the movie demonstrates, coronal cavities do occur, and so the one you may have earlier in the week, whilst a great example of a coronal cavity, is definitely not unique. What is a coronal cavity? Let Dr. Alex Young of the The Sun Today tell you:

This means that Helioviewer.org, JHelioviewer, and other applications that use Helioviewer Project services are now available and should be working as before. If you encounter any problems with any of our services please let us know. We are currently filling in missing data from 2011/08/05 through to 2011/09/16, and we ask for your patience during the next couple of weeks as we fill in the gaps. If you notice any gaps, please let us know, as we are eager to have as complete a record of solar activity as possible.

We do apologize for the interruption in service. This was caused by two distinct and unfortunately simultaneous hardware malfunctions on our server that took a long time to repair. We are looking exploring options that will ensure such a long break in service does not happen again. We are back now, and we hope you continue to explore your heliosphere!

It’s a great example of the complex evolution that an active can undergo in a relatively short amount of time. Studying the evolution of active region loops on the limb cuts right through the loops themselves so you don’t see any of the disk emission along your line of sight, and so removes a potential source of confusion.

Right at the very start you can see that loops on the southern side of the active region appear to contract (a CME and a prominence eruption are occuring). As the event progresses, you’ll notice that two dark areas appear in the coronal moss, outlined by some very bright, and small scale emission, which end up as loop footpoints to the subsequent loop brightening that occurs. This event is interesting for the detail it is possible to see in AIA, particularly in the brightening of the loop footpoints before the main bright loop occurs. Thanks to user otraLoly for sharing this video with users of helioviewer.org!

Topics covered:

Post 1 of 5: Explore the sun on your desktop with Helioviewer
Post 2 of 5: Getting Started with Helioviewer.org
Post 3 of 5: Explore the sun in depth with JHelioviewer
Post 4 of 5: How it works: building the Helioviewer “back end” with JPEG2000
Post 5 of 5: Helioviewer’s future: an Internet for solar image data

The STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) mission is very different from the other missions (Solar Dynamics Observatory and SOHO) we feature on helioviewer.org.

First off, there are two spacecraft, called STEREO-A and STEREO-B. Both spacecraft orbit the Sun at roughly 1 AU (astronomical unit), or about as far away from Sun as the Earth is. However, STEREO-A is moving ahead of the Earth in its orbit, and STEREO-B is drifting behind the Earth in its orbit. This means that each STEREO spacecraft sees different parts of the Sun, parts that we can’t see from Earth. STEREO-B sees features on the Sun that we eventually see in SDO and SOHO, and STEREO-A allows us to see the continuing evolution of features that we did see in SDO and SOHO.

This plot shows where each spacecraft is now:

As you can see, they are quite far away from the Earth. This puts some operational constraints on each spacecraft that means we get high-quality images two days after they were taken. These are the data we are making available today; images from June 1st 2011, up to the most recently available data will be available initially. We ask for your patience, as we are uploading these images right now. Over the course of the next few weeks we will be making images from earlier in the mission available so that you can explore the Sun from many different angles over the past 4 1/2 years.

The benefit of seeing the Sun from many different angles is apparent when you look at the following three videos of the prominence eruption of June 7, 2011. The first one consists of images from SDO-AIA and SOHO-LASCO

We hope you enjoy these new images! As ever, please let us know if you spot any problems.

Here are some videos of other events that from earlier this year, starting with a few of the videos from this week’s eruption:

Note: Many of the videos above are from the YouTube channel “Helioviewer”. As of this week we are moving to a new location! If you want to see new videos that we post, subscribe instead to HelioviewerScience.

In the future we will try and take measures to keep this from happening again. The last couple of days have made us look at the services we provide in a whole new way, thanks to the huge interest from you, our users, and we are grateful for that. We are constrained by our resources, so we may not be able to process many more movies each minute any time soon, but what we can do is make it easier for users to find other movies that are out there that have already been made. Thousands of movies have been made by users on Helioviewer.org, but right now there is no simple way to search through those movies and find the ones you are interested in. Further, we will also take some measures to make the users more aware of what the current wait time is before they submit a movie request, and also provide them with an option to cancel the request if they decide they do not want to wait for the movie. All of this will make it easier for you to get to the movies you want.

We apologize to all of the users who have queued movies during the last couple days that did not get processed. If you are still interested in making a movies please go ahead and queue it up again. Hopefully we will not have to take such extreme measures again. Thanks to you all for your patience.