Infrequent Solar Blast (March 20, 2009)

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SOHO observed a solar storm blast off to the left of the Sun (Mar. 17-19, 2009) over a two-day period. It appears to have originated on the far side of the Sun. In general, these coronal mass ejection (CME) explosions are fairly common, but with the Sun bumping along the bottom of its 11-year activity cycle, we have seen only a few storms over the past month. In this coronagraph still image, the Sun and some of its atmosphere are covered by an occulting disk so that we can see faint features in the surrounding corona. We superimposed an extreme UV Sun image also from SOHO taken at the nearly the same time to show its size.

SOHO began its Weekly Pick some time after sending a weekly image or video clip to the American Museum of Natural History (Rose Center) in New York City. There, the SOHO Weekly Pick is displayed with some annotations on a large plasma display.

If your institution would also like to receive the same Weekly Pick from us for display (usually in Photoshop or QuickTime format), please send your inquiry to steele.hill@gsfc.nasa.gov.