From the Sun to the Earth: The View from STEREO-A with no CME Enhancement

On this scale, the CME is so faint as to be invisible. However, the Heliospheric Imagers support such a broad range of image intensity that it is possible to observe the CME propagating through the field of view by computing differences of images with the preceeding image. This process is shown in animation #3890.

The Earth (left side) and Venus (middle) are so bright as to 'bloom' along the readout line of the CCD (Charge-coupled device) pixels, which creates the bright vertical lines that move slightly with time. The dark shape on the left of the field of view is created by an occulting tab that was installed to (occasionally) hide the bright Earth in the view.

The little cross markers label three other planets in the view of STEREO. Uranus is almost invisible in the scale of this imagery, but is visible in full-resolution datasets.