As Seen by STEREO-A: The Carrington-Class CME of 2012

  • Released Wednesday, July 23, 2014
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STEREO-A, at a position along Earth's orbit where it has an unobstructed view of the far side of the Sun, could clearly observe possibly the most powerful coronal mass ejection (CME) of solar cyle 24 on July 23, 2012. The visualizations on this page cover the entire day.

We see the flare erupt in the lower right quadrant of the solar disk from a large active region. The material is launched into space in a direction towards STEREO-A. This creates the ring-like 'halo' CME visible in the STEREO-A coronagraph, COR-2 (blue circular image).

As the CME expands beyond the field of view of the COR-2 imager, the high energy particles reach STEREO-A, creating the snow-like noise in the image. The particles also strike the HI-2 imager (blue square) brightening the image.

The HI-1 imager has had 'bloom removal' enabled and filled with contents of the immediately previous HI-1 image, which creates a linear artifact above and below bright stars and planets.

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NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Release date

This page was originally published on Wednesday, July 23, 2014.
This page was last updated on Thursday, January 25, 2024 at 12:05 AM EST.


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