Growing Sunspots - Tracking Closeup: February 2011

  • Released Friday, January 27, 2012
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This visualization tracks the emergence and evolution of a sunspot group as seen by SDO/HMI starting in early February 2011 and continuing for two weeks. Images are sampled one hour apart.

In this version, the camera tracks the movement of the solar rotation.

At this scale, a 'shimmer' of the solar surface is visible, created by the turnover of convection cells. A higher-resolution view of these convection cells can be seen in Hinode imagery (see entry #3412, Hinode's High-resolution view of solar granulation).

For a full-disk view of the Sun, covering the same time frame, see entry #3897, Growing Sunspots - A Full Disk View: February 2011.

This movie tracks sunspot rotation and shows the date and time.

This movie tracks the sunspot growth and motion. It does not display a time-tag.

Credits

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

This page was originally published on Friday, January 27, 2012.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:53 PM EDT.

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