White Light Flare in NOAA 9236
The following animated gif is made up of 23 images taken between 15:08 and 15:10 UT. The time between the individual images varies between 3 and 6 seconds. It was clear but the seeing was terrible (>2"), wind SE to 10 mph, temperature 39º. The equipment used was a 115 mm, f/7 (800 mm F.L.) refractor with a 16 mm F.L. projection lens, 210 mm from CCD, Pulnix TM-72EX video camera (1/4000 sec shutter speed), 1.2 ND front aperture 125 mm fused silica filter + 9 nm interference filter centered on 520 nm. The video was recorded on a Sony GV-D300 digital video cassette recorder. The individual frames were captured with Digital Origin PhotoDV using interpolated de-interlace. Images were unsharp masked using Adobe Photoshop LE 4.0. The animation was built using GIF Contruction Set Pro v. 2.0a by Alchemy Mindworks Inc. The scale is approximately 0.60 acrsec/pixel. North is up and East to the left.
The flare is the bright points to the west (right) of the main umbral area.
For comparison, here is a white light image taken by the TRACE spacecraft at 15:08:38 UT. Transition Region and Coronal Explorer, TRACE, is a mission of the Stanford-Lockheed Institute for Space Research, and part of the NASA Small Explorer program.
The flare was captured by spacecraft in wavelengths not accessible from Earth. The EIT instrument on the SOHO spacecraft recorded these images in the extreme ultraviolet (195Å) line of Fe XII.
The following plot is a contemporaneous X-ray flux measurement by the GOES-8 and GOES-10 spacecraft. It was provided by the Space Environment Center.
Copyright © 1999, 2000 Arthur L. Whipple, All Rights Reserved
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Page Last Updated: 12 January 2009