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Another of those coronal filament cavities can be seen near the "solar tornado" on the SW limb I posted about earlier.

[link to sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov]



Here again is the paper that some kind soul posted last month about the mysterious filament cavities-

[link to mithra.physics.montana.edu]

Just incredible!

It is huge!

Induction!?

After a lull in major solar activity, I'm getting frazzled quickly with this evening's events, LOL. I think I've uploaded a dozen smilies tonight.

The last B 8 flare was from the new SE region AR1459.
:1459EVE:
:AR1459:

RAINBOW CME movie is spectacular!
:rainboweruption:

This is from the "beyond-the-limb" flare. Two different blends from Solarsoft--

[link to sdowww.lmsal.com]

[link to sdowww.lmsal.com]

Last Edited by Hugh M Eye on 04/15/2012 01:16 AM

I don't think it is a "filament cavity". It is more likely a spaceship than a natural phenomenon. How could a plasma condense itself into a perfectly shaped sphere the size of Jupiter? It is illogical.

Last Edited by Solar Guardian on 04/15/2012 01:17 AM

OMG I think you're right. Amazingly enough just this morning I witnessed something inexplicable along the same lines as your reasoning. I first noticed it in my neighbor's yard. About 3" in diameter and PERFECTLY spherical. The surface of it glowed with all the colors of the rainbow. As I watched, it floated towards me. All of sudden it rose several feet, seemed to accelelerate and then in an instant it disappeared. WTF was that?

Spherical? Come on. Obviously it was a spaceship, scout model perhaps, with Lilliputian like aliens.

I stood there a few moments cogitating upon this revelation, when to my amazement, an entire fleet of alien ships drifted past the corner of my garage! ALL OF THEM PERFECTLY SPHERICAL!! I watched in amazement as they darted hither and yon, some in co-ordinated movements. Then poof, one by one they winked into invisibility or maybe transported to another dimension.

The spherical part is what gets me, the only implication being that it had to have been purposely constructed, in a very precise manner, obviously a manifestation of an alien technology.

I was jarred from my ruminations by sound... a rising and falling pitch seeming to revolve around a common theme somehow...coming from around the corner of the garage... from where the spheres had originated! With trepidation I cautiously approached, the sound rising in intensity. I turned the corner, and found myself confronting... something that looked very human but smaller.

The humming stopped. I raised my hand in greeting. The creature returned my gesture. I stammered out a question as to the source of the alien technology spheres. The creature raised a jar of pink fluid it held in its hand and said "Miracle Bubbles". And then it puffed out another stream of alien technology spheres. The humming started again. Sounded like "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star".

Spherical shapes an odditiy in nature?

[link to img243.imageshack.us]
[link to farm5.staticflickr.com]
[link to farm4.staticflickr.com]
[link to oddemail.com]
[link to oddemail.com]

And of course... holy shit the Earth is flat.

--

i have been follow this one for months.
the US one has a 2 day delay for approval???
the russia one seems to be better.

We see a new cme on stereo image right now


:CMEapril152012:
Latest Stereo Stereo Ahead C2 Vid:
[link to stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov]


Source was a eruption around Region 1454

Uploaded a vid



[link to www.youtube.com]

Great summary, maybe we'll see some increased flaring this week.

I'm still digging on the rainbow eruption.

:rainboweruption:

Sorry, it looks like I brought the "Anti-moon landing" political party onboard, God save the queen and all that.

Whats this on stereo behind hi 1 at the bottom of the image. it moves along in every image like a star but it's weird. I'm not talking about the bright star in the center, although i don't know what that is either. neither of these objects are labelled on stereo's planet finder.

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

Thanks for that and keeping watch

Looks like we'll be out of "B" range soon enough !

SECCHI has a star-mapping tool available for the STEREO spacecraft. Just plug in the instrument, date, etc. and "wa=lah!" you get a difficult to read star map for that day's FOV. Please bookmark for future use.

[link to secchi.nrl.navy.mil]

Forunately, the STEREO Behind map for today was an easy one to decipher. The bright star is the red-giant Antares in Scorpius and the bright cloud is the globular star-cluster M4. Messier #4 is one of the biggest and brightest star clusters in the galaxy comprising over 10,000 stars. More info on M4 here:

[link to earthsky.org]

Nice photo of M4:

[link to sidleach.com]

Hugh I think I love you! Cheers matey, that was really helpful. I'll be sure to consult this map in future!

No problema, the pleasure is mine, matey. I was curious to see what that was, also. Actually I'd lost the link to the mapping page myself and had to track it down. When I began posting here I had a dozen or two links (mostly NASA and NOAA realtime data); I now have a menu of over 500 links so I get lost trying to find stuff in a hurry, hehe. Cheers.

like i have been saying...this is not good for all of us!





just take the stereo's they went up in 2006 for a 2 years...yes 2 year, mission....that would have been over in 2008 sometime, here we are now in 2012.

SOMETHING IN THE OFFING: A potentially significant active region is about to rotate onto the Earthside of the sun. A hot plume of plasma flying



[link to www.spaceweather.com]

Oh My
[link to stereo.ssl.berkeley.edu]

We have a C-flare rise in the x-ray flux. C 1.6 so far...

[link to www.swpc.noaa.gov]

Source of the flare (peaking at C 1.8) appears to be from the same new region beyond the east limb. We should get a look at this active region soon.

[link to sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov]

[link to sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov]

Last Edited by Hugh M Eye on 04/15/2012 09:15 PM

I'm not sure where you got the"2-year mission" info but that's not correct. STEREO was designed to view the sun (and CMEs) from 360 degrees. They achieved that 180 degree separation last year; in fact it was voted as the NASA Space Achievement of the Year 2011-five years into the mission. Here's a space.com article of the 5-year anniversary of STEREO.--

Always on the move

The two spacecraft, known as Stereo-A and Stereo-B, won't be on opposite sides of the sun forever. Stereo-A flies in an orbit that's smaller and therefore faster than that of Earth, while Stereo-B has a bigger, slower orbit that causes it to lag behind.

By 2015, the twin probes will line up on the far side of the sun. Then they'll continue going their own way, getting farther apart until both are on Earth's side once again.

"Stereo was designed to understand what causes CMEs and how they travel, as well as to understand the structure of the solar wind. It's already made great strides in doing that," Gurman said, referring to the probes' mission. "I'm looking forward to the next five years."

[link to www.space.com]

Exactly. Many are afraid to apply pure reason due to ridicule. If fear of ridicule were removed, the truth would
be apparent to any one with common sense.

Two big chunks of filament have lifted off simultaneously in the SE. I think we can expect to see a CME shortly.

Mauna Loa Observatory H-Alpha movie:

[link to halpha.nso.edu]

STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) is the third mission in NASA's Solar Terrestrial Probes program (STP). This two-year mission will employ two nearly identical space-based observatories - one ahead of Earth in its orbit, the other trailing behind - to provide the first-ever stereoscopic measurements to study the Sun and the nature of its coronal mass ejections, or CMEs.
[link to stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov]
The twin STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) spacecraft were launched Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 at 8:52 p.m. EDT on a Delta II 7925-10L rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
[link to stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov]
i watched this launch back in 2006 was one of the first night launches i saw.

but the whole point is our country is more concerned with war then space exploration today, all the money is going into new ways to killing people. look at what has become of NASA in the last 2 years. the bright star of the world's space programs...now just a shell.
like i have said!!! if any if these projects run into equiptment issue we do not have the resources to fix them!
and many are operating long past their original project dates.
yes they well continue to run the projects as long as the equiptment functions, but......
look at the mars rovers.
we need to make it clear to this government that our space program is still as important now as i was back in the 60's when i was a wide eyed kid dreaming of traveling to space.
let us all hope they will keep working for more then 5 more years!
and more good wishes to all the birds in the air!

Ever since this year started there are so many filaments on the Sun. Why is that so?

Thanks for the link there, psyoptics. I can only assume they say two-year mission because that was what the budget called for at launch-time. Obviously, the spacecraft and mission objectives were planned to last much longer. As far as space repairs or rescue missions, the Space Transport Shuttle would never be able to reach STEREO A,B, ACE, or SOHO. The space shuttle was only designed to truck things into and/or out of Earth orbit. The second Hubble Telescope re-furbishment was only approved after a public outcry and much scientific lobbying. It was originally deemed unsafe due to it's extremely high orbit.
NASA has been a quasi-military organization since its inception. All of the original astronauts were military pilots (see The Right Stuff) and I'd guess that one-third of space shuttle missions involved deployment of space weapons, spy satellites, or otherwise secret military operations. SOHO/LASCO and STEREO data are run through the Naval Research Laboratory and the US Air Force is the primary spender on space weather data with NOAA being the civilian government face for public consumption. And we can't forget Jack Parsons, Werner Von Braun, OPERATION PAPERCLIP, etc. And if I had to guess, the recent failure of North Korea's satellite launch was a "boost-phase takedown" by a US/NATO anti-missile weapons system (possibly a space-based weapon system).

On the plus side, the Mars Rover Opportunity is still going strong almost a decade after its 30-day mission. Also, SOHO still does a good job after 15 years of staring at the Sun's face. And amazingly the ACE composition explorer has exceeded its intended life-span. These two craft should be a priority for replacement as they are the only early-warning system we have for extreme space-weather events...if they go down, we're pissing in the dark.

One of the commonest disinfo techniques, repeat a lie over and over.

Here's your truth and common sense.

In addition to the previously mentioned article (hahm98.pdf) searching around came up with these rather quickly... from 1999 and 2000 respectively indicating "cavity" in common usage at that time (didn't read them)...

1999... A Stable Filament Cavity with a Hot Core
[link to cdsads.u-strasbg.fr]

2000... Hot Cores in Coronal Filament Cavities
[link to cdsads.u-strasbg.fr]

And much earlier references that I didn't read...

1986... Disruption of a coronal streamer by an eruptive prominence and coronal mass ejection
[link to cdsads.u-strasbg.fr]

The abstract mentions "...erupting prominence and surrounding cavity"

Number of citations to this article... 159... some interesting and applicable titles...

[link to cdsads.u-strasbg.fr]

From [link to solarphysics.livingreviews.org]

"It is noted that, even before CME eruption, a coronal cavity may be visible surrounding the torpid prominence (e.g., Vaiana et al., 1973; Hudson et al., 1999)"

This points to an article from 1973 that evidently discusses coronal cavities (didn't read it) [link to adsabs.harvard.edu]


A couple of other selections that popped up that I did take a look at...

A new look at a polar crown cavity as observed by SDO/AIA
[link to www.aanda.org]

Two images showing the different details of the cavity/prominence in different wavelengths...
[link to www.aanda.org]
[link to www.aanda.org]

Of note in the article...

"We propose to define a polar crown cavity as a density depletion at the bottom of which the polar crown filament material sits, thereby indicating the existence of a magnetohydrostatic equilibrium. The filament material is drained down along the polar crown cavity by gravity and sustained by the action of the upward-directed magnetic field curvature force. This fact, as well as the long, steady observations of the polar crown cavity, indicates that the cavity is in a magnetohydrostatic equilibrium. The cold and hot coronal plasma are located at a similar location along the same field lines. The observations of the cavity structure and plasma spatial distribution are consistent with the classical 2D cartoon of a cavity depicted by concentric ellipses. For instance, in the classical CSHKP model (Carmichael 1964; Sturrock 1968; Hirayama 1974; Kopp & Pneuman 1976), the eruptive structure is composed of a twisted flux tube at the bottom of which the plasma is concentrated. In contrast to the cartoon proposed by Cliver et al. (1986) that places the filament material at the centre of the cavity, the filament material is located at the bottom of the cavity, which is more consistent with the model of Martens & Kuin (1989)."

Though not named specifically, the implication here is that cavity structure has been a subject of study since 1964. The sources above suggest the common place usage of the term as noted.

Also of interest...

"This preliminary study describes the structure and evolution of a polar crown filament and its cavity projected onto the plane of the sky and, in any case, gives a full picture of the eruption process. In a forthcoming paper, we will discuss the possible triggers of the cavity eruption of concomitant external (flares, CMEs) and internal (kink/torus instability, mass loading) phenomena by combining SDO/AIA and STEREO/SECCHI/EUVI images, which give us a more realistic 3D representation of the event."

The interesting part (to me) is the planned future combined usage of multiple imagery types to produce a 3d picture of the cavity similar to the procedure used by those who announced the recent new discovery of coronal cells.

About 20 references are listed.

The previous article leads quite well to this one...

THREE-DIMENSIONAL MORPHOLOGY OF A CORONAL PROMINENCE CAVITY (not my caps)
[link to iopscience.iop.org]

Of interest...

"Perhaps the greatest strength of a forward-modeling approach is that it is possible to consider how a given three-dimensional structure like the cavity may appear from different vantage points and for different observables. The sensitivity of cavity visibility to viewing angle is considerable: changes of a few degrees in neutral line orientation and/or observer's solar B angle are enough to obscure it. For example, we have demonstrated with the model why a cavity may be clearly visible on one limb and not the other, as the solar B angle can act to increase cavity visibility on one limb, but decrease visibility on the opposite limb. It is of course possible that evolution of the structure over the 2 weeks between east and west limb viewing may also play a role in the differences. However, the fact that our east limb model fit to EUVI-A data reproduced EUVI-B data reasonably well (Figure 16) is evidence that the cavity did not change greatly during the multiple days we observed it."

Which succintly explains why sometimes ya see 'em and sometimes ya don't.

They finish with "It will be interesting to use them to study how cavity properties may vary with wavelength, size, latitude, and time of solar cycle, as well as how they may evolve just prior to an eruption." Which indicates that the study of cavities might possibly furnish an eruption predictive ability in the future... pretty cool.

Over 40 references.

Of note... these structures are defined as elliptical not spherical. A quick look at wikipedia (yuch but whatever) shows that.. a partial section of an ellipse (defining ellipse as a section through a cone) can be roughly defined as semi-circular and would appear exactly as many of the coronal cavities we see on SDO appear...semi-circular. Not surprising since a circle itself can be defined as an ellipse perpendicular to the axis of a cone.

[link to en.wikipedia.org]

If anyone would like to continue to view coronal cavities as anything other than an interesting, well studied solar feature, please be consistent and address CME's as Cookie Monster Emmision.

This took two hours... bored now... must go to work.

--

IMHO, we are all learning and seeing things that we never knew were, due to the fact that this is the first solar maximum that we have had the ability and luxury of seeing it first hand from a couple of well placed satellites streaming data to our own personal computers.

It's an awesome time to be.

Good Morning

to pose a further question....
are most of the things we are seeing now...for the first time, just because we are able to see them for the first time? how did they record the first say 10 solar cycles?

Following the numbering scheme established by Wolf, the 1755–1766 cycle is traditionally numbered "1". The period between 1645 and 1715

Cycles as short as 9 years and as long as 14 years have been observed, and in the double cycle of 1784-1799 one of the two component cycles had to be less than 8 years in length.
thank you [link to en.wikipedia.org]

now what about before 1755 cycle 1. there seems to have been some record back to 1699, but what about before????
this might fall into the statement..."humans have forgoten more then we have just discovored!"
this book does pose many question about what our ancients did know on this issues!
"The Fingerprint of the Gods" [link to megpugh.com]



i started looking at the sun...mostly during the eclipses in the late 60's. we would concoct these silly cardboard tube things and just look at the shadows. kinda like the first sun spots were. not much detail.
now with the help of the new tech. we can get great images.
but this has only been in the last 20 years. it is very hard to base behavoir of a star that is millions of years old on the last 20 years.

Last Edited by psyoptics on 04/16/2012 09:56 AM