[/caption]
If you check out the Solar Dynamics Observatory website today to get an update of what the Sun is doing, (which you should -everyday!) you may have noticed a few of the daily images appeared to be “sliding” across the screen. That’s because yesterday the team from the AIA instrument (Atmospheric Imaging Assembly) performed several instrument calibration maneuvers, in which the AIA boresight was moved away from the center of the Sun. When the images are re-centered some of them have lines to the edges of the picture, creating some very nifty solar artwork. Enjoy them now, as this effect will only show up in the “rapid” images shown on their website, and later, they’ll be corrected in the science database. See more below.
SDO takes images of the Sun in several different wavelengths, which highlights different features. On SDO’s Facebook page, the team wrote, “It appears that the re-centering of the images is copying the value at the edge of the field of view rather than zero while the image is being shifted to the center of the picture.”
And even though the images will be fixed, they won’t be able to fix them completely. The information that is missing from images can’t be recovered because the instrument wasn’t pointed at the Sun at the time the image was taken.
A beautiful nebula in the southern hemisphere with a binary star at it's center seems…
The history of astronomy and observatories is full of stories about astronomers going higher and…
The JWST keeps one-upping itself. In the telescope's latest act of outdoing itself, it examined…
You've seen the Sun, but you've never seen the Sun like this. This single frame…
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have become ubiquitous, with applications ranging from data analysis, cybersecurity,…
The Search for Life in our Solar System leads seekers to strange places. From our…