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.
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21 Jun 2019
Scrolling across a flare
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Sean Brannon
One of IRIS's priority observations during the current solar minimum is taking large context observations ("synoptics") of any active regions that cross the solar disk, from when they first become visible on the solar limb until they disappear over the opposite side. This particular active region, know as NOAA AR 12740, produced several small eruptions during these synoptic observations, and then finally produced an actual C6.7 flare early on May 9th. Although small by flare standards, it still covers a large portion of IRIS imagers, and the scrolling observation mode means that spectral data was gathered from multiple different locations as the flare evolved.