IRIS Movie of the Day
At least once a week a movie of the Sun taken by NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) is posted by one of the scientists operating the instrument.
Active Region Turning the Corner
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Jake Parker
Thanks to STEREO, a solar telescope that orbits the sun, IRIS gets early warning of interesting solar features that are going to rotate onto the portion of the sun we can see from Earth. These four raster images of the limb, taken over the course of three hours, show the evolution of the active region as it turns into view. Catching an active region this early gives us the most time to track it's evolution as it crosses the solar disk and allows us to study features too faint to be seen over a bright background.