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.
Little Loop at the Limb
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Lucas Guliano
The middle of August 2023 has proven to be surprisingly quiet for this phase of the solar cycle and for how active it has been the rest of the summer. While there is still a good amount of sunspots and active regions, those regions decided to take a summer holiday and didn't produce an M level flare for almost 2 weeks. While our definition of 'active Sun' is getting stricter as we approach solar maximum, there was still some activity even during this lull period. This video shows an interesting loop structure forming at the limb that IRIS perfectly scanned over. It isn't the biggest event, but we expect this down period to quickly be replaced by explosive activity again!