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

  • Released Friday, December 16, 2011
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This visualization shows the original dataset from STEREO-A used to extract the motion of the coronal mass ejection (CME) in ID 3890. The data are combined from the SECCHI instrument, which includes an ultraviolet image of the Sun (EUVI), two coronographs (COR-1 & COR-2), and the wide-angle Heliospheric Imagers (HI-1 & HI-2).

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.

A movie of the heliospheric region viewed from STEREO-A. If you watch the bright 'bloom' created by the Earth (left side) starting around the December 28, 2008 time marker, you will see a much smaller, fainter 'bloom' appear between the Earth and the Sun. This is the Moon appearing at maximum elongation relative to the STEREO-A spacecraft.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

This page was originally published on Friday, December 16, 2011.
This page was last updated on Tuesday, November 14, 2023 at 12:01 AM EST.

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