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.
It just won't stop raining!
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Chris Nelson
Observing the side of an active region as it rotates onto the solar disk provides some incredible movies. In this example, we see long arms of coronal rain - plasma suspended in the corona which rapidly cools from millions of degrees to thousands of degrees over the course of just a few seconds - continuously form and fall back towards the solar surface. The scientific value of these datasets is huge allowing us to understand complex processes occurring on the Sun, especially when combined with data from other satellites at other vantage points such as Solar Orbiter.