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.
Small flares before a large flare in an active region close to the limb
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Paola Testa (SAO)
On January 18th 2022 IRIS observed a M1.5 flare in AR 12929 - the first large flare observed with IRIS at very high cadence (~1s; see IRIS Movie of the Day
https://iris.lmsal.com/mod?cmd=view-pod&pubDate=2022-01-27 ). Here we show similar IRIS high cadence observations catching a few smaller flares (B-class) in AR 12930, just North of AR 12929, a few hours before another large flare (M5.5, starting at ~5:40UT on 1/20/2022) in AR 12929. The movie on the left shows the IRIS slit-jaw (1330A) observations of the lower atmosphere, while the movie on the right shows the coronal emission (>~8MK) as observed by 94A passband of the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) onboard the Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO). The observed active region is close to W limb offering a side view of the flare ribbons with IRIS.