Tuesday, May 13, 2014

GIANT DRAGONS This Was the Best Watched Solar Flare Ever

This Was the Best Watched Solar Flare Ever:

X1-class solar flare on March 29, 2014 as seen by NASA's IRIS (video screenshot) Credit: NASA/IRIS/SDO/Goddard Space Flight Center
GIANT DRAGONS This Was the Best Watched Solar Flare Ever
X1-class solar flare on March 29, 2014 as seen by NASA’s IRIS (video screenshot) Credit: NASA/IRIS/SDO/Goddard Space Flight Center
Are giant dragons flying out of the Sun? No, this is much more awesome than that: it’s an image of an X-class flare that erupted from active region 2017 on March 29, as seen by NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) spacecraft. It was not only IRIS’s first view of such a powerful flare, but with four other solar observatories in space and on the ground watching at the same time it was the best-observed solar flare ever.

(But it does kind of look like a dragon. Or maybe a phoenix. Ah, pareidolia!)

Check out a video from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center below:


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