Have you taken a seat already? http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/

An extra link from a friend:

http://aia.lmsal.com/public/firstlight.html
http://aia.lmsal.com/public/firstlight/

I have reason to believe there will be some incredible videos posted there.

The SDO Outreach team really seem to have a handle on it, don't they? I think this will be a brilliant and very rewarding mission to follow - and that sales of solar viewing telescopes will rocket after tonight.

Or people might go ( like I did a while ago ) "Meh - not much point looking through a telescope with pics like this available"

Yeah, but then they actually *look* through a telescope, and see the prominences leaping off the Sun with their own eyes, and the Sun becomes... alive... I'm hoping to get a solar telescope set up at our solar system scale model in August - and planning on some big summer overtime to afford to buy a Coronado for myself, too :-)

I am in the front row.

Presser now starting on NASA TV.

Either way, it should definitely help the hard drive industry.

Umm.

WOW

As "Lika" said, "... struck with awe."

I haven't gotten the movs to download, but the stills are nice. Like this one:
http://aia.lmsal.com/public/firstlight/201...44515/f0171.gif

I only attempted to download one, but didn't have a problem.

If it weren't 40 Mb I would e-mail it to you.

I was poking around the SDO First Light web page and I found this site. Has the movies in numerous formats and sizes.

Scientific Visualization Studio

I think I will spending some time there.

Edited my previous links to the actual HTML page rather than a directory listing:
http://aia.lmsal.com/public/firstlight.html

OHH EM EFF GEE......

*dies*



......no words.

Mindblowing.

SDO might just be the mission that finally converts Mrs. nprev into an UMSF fan...just caught her independently surfing to this site on her MacBook!

Just stunning.

Like MRO/LRO all over again!

Quite a trio we've got going on eh?

That's it, she's come over to the Dark Side now...

You'll have to behave now, Nick!

No worries. She married a sleazy cigar-smoking robot, she knows the score.

I wonder why they didnt go with the same colour scheme for the 304 (orange) ,171 (Blue) and 193 (Green) lines like those from SOHO and STEREO.

Here's the SOHO EIT 171 image taken at about the same time as the SDO 171 IMAGE, the difference is staggering.

SOHO 171

SDO 171

The SDO image is a 10MB GIF, couldn't find it in JPG format.



And again with the EIT 304 image

SOHO EIT 304

SDO 304

Again the SDO image is a 10MB GIF

On the press conference and EVE instrument:

The solar image on the EVE spectrum image is not a mistake. We designed the instrument almost from the beginning to use an otherwise unused portion of one of the spectrometer CCDs as a pinhole camera - we call it SAM, the Solar Aspect Monitor. SAM has its own hardware including a precision 26 micron pinhole, filter wheel, and its own optical path with a door (one of four on the instrument) that we had to open to get first light.

The unexpected thing about it is that we are able to see the sun as well as we do. The SAM image was apparent in the very first CCD image we got down. We weren't expecting to be able to see the limb or active regions this well until years from now, well up into solar max.

-- A concerned EVE data processing engineer

V cool...

"SDO shows Earth eclipsing Sun":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjlFL-3rLLE

Those comparison images really drive home the difference in resolving power.
The comparison between MRO taking on MGS's role is more and more apt!

What exactly was said about that? It surprised me when I heard it but I was busy writing down other things so I didn't get what the P.I. said. It seemed weird to me that an image of the Sun showing up so beautifully on a detector would be a "mistake."

Come on, you knew it was coming...

http://astropoetry.wordpress.com/2010/04/2...-opens-its-eyes

From the report on Spaceflightnow.com: http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n1004/21sdoimages/


I may have misinterpreted this, but I remember thinking at the time that it sounded like he said this was a mistake.

Yeah, the way it was worded made me think it was a problem too.

But, is it? Is there worry that at solar max the pinhole image will obscure the spectrum? (Or some such thing?)

It's "unexpected," but is it okay?

We don't expect the SAM image to cause a problem, even at solar max. There is plenty of space on the CCD between the solar image and the spectrum. If it does somehow cause a problem, we can turn the SAM filter wheel to 'dark' and effectively turn SAM off. SAM is a lower priority measurement -- EVE is primarily a spectrometer, and there are five other cameras on SDO, all higher-resolution than SAM.

SAM isn't even really an imager - we plan on using it to get a spectrum as well. The main EVE measurement is a spectrum from about 7nm, right on the edge between ultraviolet and x-rays, out to about 120nm, at the Lyman Alpha line. We use SAM to fill in the spectrum from 7nm down to almost zero, in the soft x-ray band.

It's really hard to build a diffraction grating that works for x-rays. The smaller the wavelength is, the smaller the lines on the grating have to be. It's hard enough to get a grating that works well in extreme ultraviolet. Also, x-rays being x-rays, they have a tendency to pass through the grating rather than be diffracted by it.

So, SAM doesn't use a grating at all. We collect the image of the sun, and then analyze that image pixel-by-pixel. SAM is designed with a small-enough pinhole and short-enough exposure that we expect only one x-ray photon to hit any one pixel. When a pixel does get hit, its brightness is directly proportional to the energy of the photon that hit it. Then we can use Planck's constant to get the wavelength of each photon, then count and bin the photons to get a spectrum.

It's a really neat concept, and one that hasn't to my knowledge been tried in space. The theory is good, but in theory, theory and practice are identical, while in practice, they are not. We are treating it as an engineering experiment. We have a long way to go before we see this work, but initial signs are good.

Perhaps I missed the information within thread... do we have any indication of public, regular, real-time images release in the next future???

SDO Day 76: Getting Ready for Science Data

Mon, 26 Apr

SDO is moving toward becoming an operational science mission. The data will be available from several sites in a variety of formats. SDO scientists and engineers are working to set up those access points, but we won't be ready for regular data releases until mid-May.

Next step is the EVE calibration rocket, scheduled to fly on May 3, 2010 from the White Sands Missile Range.

More prominence vids:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/scien...r10_plasmarain/

Now that we have "real-time" images of the sun, I've been wondering about the issue of light-time delay:

In these images, do the scientists need to take into account the light-time travel distance between different parts of the sun?

For most planets, even Jupiter, it doesn't make much of a difference. But the sun is several light-seconds wide. (Ah, "about 4.643" in diameter from a quick Wikipedia lookup.) The sun is a globe, so if dead center of the image is "now", the edge of the images would presumably show events that happened a few seconds "before" the center's events--in other words, no picture of the sun shows it all "at the same time"!

Would this effect distort the shape of prominences? (I mean really big ones.) Should we "correct" images for it? (Leave the center alone, but shove the part at the edge back closer to the sun so "the is the shape it really was at that moment"?)

Maybe we should mentally overlay an archers-target of concentric rings over sun images: label bulls-eye as "now", the next ring as "x sec. ago", etc.

Can we fix this? Merge pictures taken a few seconds apart: keep the center and merge the outer part from a few seconds before it... Oh darn. It only takes pictures every 10 seconds. Missed the window! But you know what I'm going for.

What is the way solar scientists handle this issue?

I would imagine that since not a lot of things occur in a 4-second duration on the sun, compared to what all is being observed, it's forgivable.

But I'm not a solar physicist so that's just my uneducated guess.

The scale of observations should be considered. Phenomena of interest such as prominences, etc. are fairly localized, so the speed of light isn't really much of a factor. In any case, events that might effect the entire Sun (i.e., long-period 'seismic' oscillations) obviously propagate at far less than the speed of light, so again SOL lag isn't really a consideration for observation or interpretation.

There are smaller version available on youtube if you don't fancy the 25MB version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C9L90uAOXs

ouch, a hair on the lens?!

Spectacular images! - I really look forward to a hi-def 1080p hour-long movie for my flat-screen tv!

Looks like it's directly on the detector, or it was a CR hit on the flat field calibration frame.

Take a look to most recent images from:
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/suntoday


http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...ecent/l0131.jpg
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...ecent/l0171.jpg
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...ecent/l0193.jpg
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...ecent/l0211.jpg
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...ecent/l0094.jpg
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...ecent/l0335.jpg
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...ecent/l1600.jpg
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...ecent/l1700.jpg
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...ecent/l4500.jpg
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...ecent/l0304.jpg

http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...304_211_171.jpg
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...094_335_193.jpg
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...211_193_171.jpg

Change letter "l" to "f" or "t" is:
l - 1024x1024 px
f - 4096x4096 px
t - 512x512 px

More info:
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/js/whats_this.html

cool

Oh man, like my hard drive wasn't groaning already...

VERY chuffed - and honoured - to have my "First Light" poem featured on the SDO Website...

http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/mission/project/leostatus.php

Well done, Stu!

http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/

The SDO site now has access to images, although its listed as "the sun now" they are about 36 hours old.

Some fantastic magnetic loops visible in the "193" images today

The SDO images have been looking a little odd lately, not sure if its a processing issue before they go onto the web or what. Looking badly overexposed.

Maybe the sun is too bright?
<ducks>

Stunning prominence visible to SDO right now

Gorgeous pic, thanks!

I was really tthinking about buying a solar telescope, but can't help wondering "What's the point, when I can enjoy the view via SDO?" But I'm one of those people who actually finds more enjoyment and satisfaction in seeing Jupiter's belts and moons for real, through my own 4.5" reflector, than I do from looking at a Hubble portrait, so I'll probably still get one... some day...