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.
Long Duration M-Class Flare
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Lucas Guliano (SAO)
The week from October 27th to November 2nd proved to be an extremely exciting one on the Sun. During this seven day window, the sun unleashed multiple high energy flare events from different regions across the disk. This included an X-class flare on the 28th, multiple M-class flares, and a whole lot of B/C level activity. Although IRIS just missed the X-class flare, we were able to capture the final M-class flare of this high activity period. This video shows a scan taken of region 12891 while it was in the middle of a long duration M1.7 flare. The large scan reveals the true size of the event as energetic material cascades out and across of the region.