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.
Over-the-limb prominence
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Lijia Guo
On 12-Aug-2018, IRIS captured a prominence over the limb during a coordinated campaign with SUVI. Solar prominences are made of cool plasma that are visible in low-temperature bandpasses. Part of the prominence seems to be confined by loop-like structures, while the other part of it breaks apart and form coronal rain. Bright pixels that stands out clearly at the end of the movie are not caused by solar radiation but happen whenever high energy particles hit our CCD camera when IRIS is passing through the Earth's radiation belts.