Early morning C class flare + Coronal mass ejection... and a little run through for you.

Well since the pinned thread is full of idiots and an OP that has no idea what they are talking about, I thought I'd let you know the actual details.

First off, let me say that a flare cannot be seen on any coronagraph cameras.

To see a flare you have to look at the solar surface, where you can see the brightening of the magnetic filaments.

To everyone who cannot tell where a flare is just by looking at the images then...

Click on one of the events at the bottom here: [link to www.lmsal.com]

It will show you where if it has been updated.

Anyway, as I'm going to guide you through this I might as well point to this flare, ah we see it was a C1.6 class flare peaking at 3:30 am and stopping at 4:38 am.

And the link for it: [link to www.lmsal.com]

Notice how stereo B caught it and where it shows the map position.

So then we hop over to stereo, [link to stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov] Go onto Behind Euvi 195.

Pick an early image to show: [link to stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov] then the closest to the peak. [link to stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov] [link to stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov]

Would you look at that small brightened patch, there's your flare.

Now you can also see a darker patch above it,, so let's go and check the video shall we?

[link to stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov]

Ah yes, we can see an explosion just before the peak of the flare. mmm that would be a Coronal mass ejection from a snapping magnetic filament.

And also looking closely we can see that there was no solar Tsunami.

Now we have the location and the time that the coronal mass ejection was launched.

But oh dear, It seems to be heading right at the stereo behind craft, we can look at the Cor2 movie anyway, but it's unlikely to reveal anything useful.

[link to stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov]

Mmmm, not very useful, the coronal mass ejection is too spread out on that movie to tell it's size or shape, but we can tell it's general direction.

Because we know where the stereo B craft is right now: [link to stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov]

So looking at that and comparing the Coronal mass ejection to it we find that the bulk of the CME is heading away from th earth anyway.

But there is still that bit on the right, we don't actually know it's true direction, so lets head over to soho. [link to sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov]

Straight into the lasco c3 images..

And what's this! Missing data, oh well no big deal.

Although we do get to see here that there was a tiny CME on the bottom left earlier on [link to sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov]

But we also know that that is so small and slow that it's nothing to even be concerned about and due to it's expansion and time, and location that our best bet to find the ejection point would be to look on stereo behind Euvi 195 for late yesterday [link to stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov]

Anyway, since lasco C3 wasn't working at the time, we must then check C2.

By going here: [link to sohodata.nascom.nasa.gov] because the "more 512x512" link below lasco C2 doesn't go far enough into the past to see.

So we choose lasco C2 and select list or iamges if you must and just click search.

But from here we notice that all the data for lasco c2 is up for the time.

And so we choose a few from around the time, open them up to have a look and find the CME [link to sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov]

We still don't know it it will definately miss us completly, but we now have a very good idea of where it is travelling.

Remember that soho's viewpoint is from the lagrange point 1.

And so we then check the movie for c2

And from there we can see the direction and it just confirms the previous thoughts that this CME will miss us.

Any questions?

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And another flare [link to www.n3kl.org]

From here (6 hour 1 minute data) [link to www.swpc.noaa.gov]

We can see it's a C1.0 class flare

And that it's already on lmsal [link to www.lmsal.com]

And it's location is the same as the previous

So over to stereo and generally at the current time the movie tends to not be updated.

So for your ease I've provided the before, during and after peak images:

[link to stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov] [link to stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov] [link to stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov]


Also for those that want to see the power and beauty behind these flares we can head over to SDO (I don't use SDO too much as it tends to have a slow update speed)

[link to sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov] Go to today, bronze , movie. This show the magentic field lines reconstucting with plasma being thrown around in them.

And this one shows the flares off nicely.

Same as above just choose red, you can easily see the flares. And the new C1.0

Last Edited by OTOC on 01/14/2011 09:11 AM