Spotlight on SOHO at Wolverine’s Den

Spotlight on SOHO

20Feb06

Check out the latest pick of the week from SOHO (the SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory):

Image Credit: SOHO (ESA & NASA)

From Min. to Max. to Min.
This week SOHO offers a sense of the kind of retrospective that ten years of solar observations from the same instrument can offer: a comparison of three EIT 304 Angstrom images (in extreme ultraviolet light) across ten years. The left-hand image is one of the earliest EIT images from SOHO, taken just months after its launch in late 1995 when the Sun was near its minimum level of activity. Overall, it is strikingly similar in the general level of solar activity observed (usually seen as whiter areas in these kinds of images) to the right-hand image taken just this week. Both are almost devoid of intense regions of magnetic activity. At solar minimum, they also give a much clearer view of the polar coronal holes, the darker regions at the bottom and, to a lesser extent, the top of the Sun. The central image from this same week in 2001 shows a very different Sun: one that is brighter, features several large regions of activity, and with a large prominence extending out on its right. This is the Sun near its period of maximum of activity in its 11-year cycle.

We can also glean from this comparison that SOHO’s CCD imager for EIT has held up quite well in that the level of detail and lack of burn in are quite comparable. Kudos to the scientists and engineers who designed and built such a dependable instrument.

SOHO recently celebrated its 10th year of operations (more here).

I’m really amazed by the longevity of the spacecraft and its instruments. SOHO was launched in 1995 with an intended mission duration of only three years. Here we are in early 2006 and it’s still going strong in spite of all the painful bombardment dished out by the Sun, problems with its high-gain antenna, and a number of similar logistics challenges. As it stands, the mission has been yet again extended through the end of next year in order to complete its chronicle of an 11-year solar cycle.

As noted on the anniversary page linked above, take a moment to ponder these milestones offered by the venerable observatory:

140 Ph.D. theses have been written on or about SOHO data.
289 scientific meetings on subjects related to SOHO appear on our meetings pages.
944 news stories appear on our newsroom pages (only recorded between 1997 and 2005!).
1000 comets have been found. SOHO is the most prolific comet-finder observatory of all times, and has identified almost half of all comets for which an orbit determination has been made.
2300 reviewed papers using SOHO data have been published.
2300 scientists (approximately) appear in the author lists of those papers (we like to say that every current solar scientist has had the chance to work with SOHO data).
3230 science planning meetings have been held.
2,000,000 command blocks have been sent to the spacecraft by the ground system.
5,000,000 distinct files have been served by the web server.
10,000,000 exposures (almost!) have been made by the CDS instrument.
16,000,000 distinct hosts have been served by the web server.
100,000,000 exposures have been taken by MDI! They’re probably quite high on the list of “the world’s most durable camera shutters”. Don’t try to beat it with your favourite SLR camera!
266,000,000 web page requests have been served.
16,000,000,000,000 bytes (16 Terabytes) of data are contained in the SOHO archive (including MDI data at Stanford).
85,000,000,000,000 bytes (85 Terabytes) of web pages/data have been served from the GSFC archive.
114,000,000,000,000 bytes (114 Terabytes) of web pages/data have been served over the internet when the Stanford MDI archive is included. The total amount of data given to users is quite a bit higher when offline requests are accounted for.

Pretty spiffy, I’d say.

You may view the latest imagery returned by SOHO’s instruments here, updated automatically on a regular basis.

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Filed under: Astronomy, Science, Sun |

22 Responses to “Spotlight on SOHO”

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1 CS on Feb 21st, 2006 said:

Wow, what fantastic pictures!

I’ve always had a passing interest in science in general, and astronomy in particular, but recently it’s come back with a vengeance, partly because of reading the reports about Dr James Hansen and George Deutsch. The increasing level of political and religious interference in science is pretty darn scary.

This is a great site you have here; I’ll be back to read more.
2 Wolverine on Feb 21st, 2006 said:

Thanks, glad you enjoy.
3 wolf on Feb 21st, 2006 said:

The sun is an amazing thing, it just keeps on burning. Thank Goodness!
4 Wolverine on Feb 21st, 2006 said:

The SOHO site isn’t so lucky (today) — I’d wanted to post a couple of my favorite video clips here but their page has been down.
5 Wolverine on Feb 22nd, 2006 said:

Looks like they’re back to normal.

Take a peek at The Best of SOHO sometime — a stunning collection.

This is my favorite sequence captured to date.
6 Solar Flare on Feb 25th, 2006 said:

Nice little tribute to SOHO & ESA, Wolverine. SOHO’s “Best Of Movies” of filaments and prominences is a real treat here, too, if one has the patience to download them. Seeing the Sun in action is very cool. (Well, no, hot.)
7 Solar Flare on Feb 25th, 2006 said:

Oops, I apparently don’t know how to link here.
8 Wolverine on Feb 25th, 2006 said:

No worries, I fixed it.

BBcodes don’t work here, you have to format links via HTML.

See the top formatting example here.

(I tried umpteen times to get the actual formatting to display here, but the software thinks it’s smarter than I am and converted it to a URL anyway. GRR!)
9 Solar Flare on Feb 25th, 2006 said:

Oh geez! I really DO know HTML tags…too much time looking directly at the sun, I suppose. Jumping from BB code to HTML…it’s taxing at 4 in the morning.

Wish I could preview before you wonder just how blonde I am!
10 Solar Flare on Feb 25th, 2006 said:

OK, wait a minute–I don’t mean to belabor this, but exactly what HTML tags can we use? I tried BOLD and they didn’t all work. I suppose I can do generic things like italics, huh?.

Is it just that the author reserves the right not to let posters play with font colors and sizes? Hrrmph, I thought a little orange smattering would match the Sun.

(You are welcome to delete this if you’d like.)
11 Wolverine on Feb 25th, 2006 said:

Ahha! You’re hip to the drill.

A “preview” feature would be nice, but it’s not included by default. I wonder if there’s a WordPress hack that’ll add one…
12 Wolverine on Feb 25th, 2006 said:

Colors I don’t think are supported, but let’s see what all works…

Bold
Italic
Underline
Font size
~~Strikethrough~~…

I think that’s about it.
13 Wolverine on Feb 25th, 2006 said:

Image…
14 Wolverine on Feb 25th, 2006 said:

Colors are indeed possible. Mea Culpa.
15 Solar Flare on Feb 25th, 2006 said:

Ok, do tell. On my board I simply use (font color=gold size=5)THE SUN IS HOT.(/FONT) where () represents and that’s what works.

So, why is it different? The green looks good, btw.

I wonder if you can block the text. You should recognize this:

I set a course just east of Lyra
And northwest of Pegasus
Flew into the light of Deneb
Sailed across the Milky Way
On my ship, the “Rocinante”
Wheeling through the galaxies,
Headed for the heart of Cygnus
Headlong into mystery
16 Wolverine on Feb 25th, 2006 said:

Familiar lyrics indeed.

The tag/format differences here probably stem from a combination of the WordPress software and how I have it set up.

Since I’m lazy, I’m using the BBcode extension for Firefox (available here), which allows you to tag text with right-clicks, in BBcode and XHTML. It’s marvy.

– replace parentheses with <> –

(span style=”font-size: 14px”)Font size(/span) = Font size
17 Wolverine on Feb 25th, 2006 said:

(em)(/em) = italic
(strong)(/strong) = bold
(ins)(/ins) = underline
(del)(/del) = ~~strikethrough~~
(span style=”color: #33FF33″)green(/span) = green

That nifty little extension does it all from its own handy little menu.
18 Wolverine on Feb 25th, 2006 said:

(span style=”font-size: 18px”)(strong)(span style=”color: #FFCC33″)THE SUN IS HOT!(/span)(/strong)(/span) =

THE SUN IS HOT!
19 Solar Flare on Feb 26th, 2006 said:

Hmm, you’re making my life more complicated; it’s easier to remember “green,” “red,” etc. I suppose I’ll survive.

Let me take a guess with the color and size here:

THE SUN IS HOT!
20 Solar Flare on Feb 26th, 2006 said:

Umm, let me try again.

THE SUN IS HOT!
21 Solar Flare on Feb 26th, 2006 said:

Argh, I copied what you posted, but changed the size and color. I don’t know what happened. Sorry to annoy you. Life was easier with plain ‘ol HTML.
22 Wolverine on Feb 26th, 2006 said:

Don’t sweat it, not an annoyance at all. It was fun to test out the tags in the comments section, since I wasn’t sure of all the possibilities (I’m spoiled by being the site admin, and if I go in to edit anything, comments included, it gives me the benefit of a full WYSIWYG interface. )

Something must have gone awry tag-wise; peeking back into your post it doesn’t show any color formatting included at all, so it must have discarded something it didn’t like.

Just for grins I’ll peek and see if there’s an add-on for the comments section that’ll simplify the process.