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.
False-color scans of AR 12907
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Roy Smart
NOAA active region 12907 was scanned 31 times by IRIS as it crossed the solar disk. At each frame, a column of pixels is observed by the IRIS spectrograph, which allows us to see the 'color' of the sun for a brief moment in time. The colors correspond to Doppler shifts of the Si IV 1394 A spectral line. Blue means plasma is moving towards the observer, red means the plasma is moving away from the observer, green means the plasma is stationary, and purple means the plasma is moving towards and away simultaneously.