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.
C1.2 Flare Near West Limb
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, P. R. Jibben (SAO)
This C1.2 flare happened near the west limb on 16 July 2017 starting at 17:42 UT. This movie shows what the flare looked like in Si IV 1400. The data have been rotated so that the west limb of the Sun is pointing up. You may have noticed that the top of the image is evolving slower than the bottom. IRIS scans across the active region to create a sequence of images. The region in the center of the field of view gets recorded in every image but the edges get cut off. In this sequence of images, IRIS makes 12 steps to capture the entire field of view. To be able to view the changes in both the partial covered region and the region near the center. The farthest scan in each of the 12 steps is always displayed. This way, we can easily see where all that ejected plasma ends up.