Active Region AR13182 launches an X1.2 Class Solar Flare - January 6, 2023
- Visualizations by:
- Tom Bridgman
- Produced by:
- Scott Wiessinger
- View full credits
Here, Active Region 13182 (lower left of solar disk on limb) launches an X1.2-class flare in early January 2023 (Solar Flares: What does it take to be X-class?). The point-spread function correction (PSF) has been applied to all the imagery on this page.
The X1.2 flare event of January 6, 2023 as seen in the SDO AIA 131 angstrom filter. The dark region around the central 'X' marking the flare is an artifact of the PSF correction. 'Flickering' in the images around the flare are created due to the 'flare mode' images which have a shorter exposure. Normalizing the solar disk to the same brightness in these frames enhances the background noise off the solar disk.
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.Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio
Visualizer
- Tom Bridgman (GST) [Lead]
Producer
- Scott Wiessinger (KBRwyle) [Lead]
Technical support
- Ian Jones (ADNET)
- Laurence Schuler (ADNET)
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Datasets used in this visualization
SDO AIA 131 (A.K.A. 131 Filter) (Collected with the AIA sensor)
Dataset can be found at: http://jsoc.stanford.edu/
See more visualizations using this data setSDO AIA 171 (A.K.A. 171 Filter) (Collected with the AIA sensor)
Dataset can be found at: http://jsoc.stanford.edu/
See more visualizations using this data setSDO AIA 304 (A.K.A. 304 Filter) (Collected with the AIA sensor)
Dataset can be found at: http://jsoc.stanford.edu/
See more visualizations using this data setNote: 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.