
NASA's New Eye on the Sun Delivers Stunning First Images - duck
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sdo/news/first-light.html
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acdha
We[1] have more text, a bigger video and other pictures here, too:

[http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
nasa/2010/21...](http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
nasa/2010/21apr_firstlight/)

[1] Speaking as one of the site developers, not to take credit from the
scientists

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ascuttlefish
I posted a link to the videos on the Solar Dynamics Observatory website
earlier, but it didn't go anywhere. This is fascinating stuff!

Link to more videos: <http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/firstlight/>

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mrcharles
I saw those last night. I was wondering, but wasn't able to find out -- the
videos, are they compressed time? Or 1:1 time? Because the one of the flare is
absolutely amazing.

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mturmon
I don't know the duration, but would be surprised if that huge structure
lasted more than a few hours (due to the lack of visible rotation of the
feature -- the rotational period of the sun is about 27 days as seen from
Earth).

The spatial scale is also awe-inspiring. The diameter of the prominence is
about 1/6 that of the Sun. The Sun is about 110x the diameter of the Earth.
This means 15-20 Earths would fit, end to end, inside the magnetic loop. For
another point of comparison, see:

<http://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/eit/images/Sun_and_earth.jpg>

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car
Truly breathtaking images of our central star.

I met one of the project scientists 13 years ago, and it's great to see the
culmination of his and the teams work.

As an aside, a great movie about the Sun is 'Sunshine'
(<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448134/>), by Danny Boyle of Slumdog
Millionaire fame, no less. Worth a view,
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BZa93i6kl4>.

Now back to stargazing.

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tjic
This is cool, but I'm a bit underwhelmed that NASA labels its OWN immages as
"stunning".

Seriously "NASA's New Eye on the Sun Delivers Stunning First Images" is the
kind of press flack hucksterism we'd decry if any other firm promoted itself
that transparently.

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mturmon
Keep in mind that the instrument developers who built the two imagers onboard
have spent the last ~10 years of their life working largely on this project.
For many of them, it will be the crowning achievement of their career. The
results are likely to reshape the discipline due to the increase in spatial
and (especially!) temporal resolution.

To get this thing to work, they had to overcome a lot of technical obstacles,
including thermal stability of the focal plane and optics (it's a high-
resolution telescope that mostly sits in the sun, but goes into Earth's shadow
regularly, altering lengths of optical paths), and bandwidth issues (a set of
16-bit 4096x4096 images every ~10 seconds).

Finally, and this is not made clear in the press materials, they're exploiting
some neat spectral effects to get unusual "images": spatially-resolved
velocity (thru Doppler shifting of spectral lines) and spatially-resolved
magnetic field (thru the Zeeman effect). That is, an image of local magnetic
field. Those calibrated images are a main driver of the science -- although
the flare pictures are cool.

Putting it all together is an impressive technical feat.

