Pictures From the Sun

Thursday, 2:58 PM EST At this hour, radiation from the Sun is washing past us, changing the shape of the Earth’s magnetic field, and pelting some spacecraft with high amounts of radiation. So far, if it’s doing more than that, we don’t know about it.  It could be–could, but won’t necessarily be–that a power grid somewhere will get zapped with extra current, or high-frequency radio signals in some places will be blocked out.  Meanwhile, there are some very cool pictures of the solar flare that caused all this:
These images came from different filters on the SOHO probe, jointly run by NASA and ESA, the European Space Agency.  Since it was launched in December 1995, it has been floating about a million miles away from us at a LaGrange point, where the Sun’s and Earth’s gravity balance each other and the spacecraft stays in place.  The bright area in the right center of first two images is the solar flare that appeared late yesterday, and is sending charged particles in our direction now.  The third picture shows the cluster of sunspots that caused it.  Each of those dots is larger than the Earth. To see more, take a look HERE, and click on "The Sun Now" in the upper left corner.  (Larger images are HERE.  The acronyms are different instruments and wavelengths of light.)  If your computer can stand it, go to the bottom of the page for quicktime or MPEG time-lapse movies.  Try the green; it’s the clearest.  Then try the yellow one–and see how SOHO’s instruments were overwhelmed by the flare.