Solar X-Flare - April 20, 2022 (X2.2 class)
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- Visualizations by:
- Tom Bridgman
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- Produced by:
- Scott Wiessinger
- View full credits
Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) operates in a geosynchronous orbit around Earth to obtain a continuous view of the Sun. The particular instrument in this visualization records imagery in the ultraviolet portion of the spectrum at wavelengths normally absorbed by Earth's atmosphere - so we need to observe them from space.
An X2.2 class solar flare erupts on the southern limb of the Sun in the early hours of April 20, 2022. This flare is very close to the lower right of the solar limb and most visible in the 131 Angstrom filter (teal color table). Solar flares are classified by the amount of energy released (Solar Flares: What Does It Take to Be X-Class?)
What is the PSF (Point Spread-Function)?
Many telescopes, especially reflecting telescopes such as the ones used on SDO (Wikipedia), have internal structures that support various optical components. These components can result in incoming light being scattered to other parts of the image. This can appear in the image as a faint haze, brightening dark areas and dimming bright areas. The point-spread function (Wikipedia) is a measure of how light that would normally be received by a single camera pixel, gets scattered onto other pixels. This is often seen as the "spikes" seen in images of bright stars. For SDO, it manifests as a double-X shape centered over a bright flare (see Sun Emits Third Solar Flare in Two Days). The effect of this scattered light can be computed, and removed, by a process called deconvolution (Wikipedia). This is often a very compute-intensive process which can be sped up by using a computers graphics-processing unit (GPU) for the computation.
For More Information
See NASA.gov
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio
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Visualizer
- Tom Bridgman (Global Science and Technology, Inc.) [Lead]
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Producer
- Scott Wiessinger (KBR Wyle Services, LLC) [Lead]
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Technical support
- Ian Jones (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
- Laurence Schuler (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Datasets used in this visualization
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SDO AIA 304 (304 Filter)
ID: 677This dataset can be found at: http://jsoc.stanford.edu/
See all pages that use this dataset -
SDO AIA 171 (171 Filter)
ID: 680This dataset can be found at: http://jsoc.stanford.edu/
See all pages that use this dataset -
SDO AIA 131 (131 Filter)
ID: 730This dataset can be found at: http://jsoc.stanford.edu/
See all pages that use this dataset
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.