STEREO sun: 3D anaglyphs

Stereoscopic anaglyphs are big images, with low compression, because they need reliable colours that work with red/cyan filters. If your connection is slow the pictures may not show up and you will need to reload the page.

Ultraviolet images of the sun from STEREO mission

No Sunspots

Sunspot in 3D, also H alpha versus visible light

Prominences in coronal cavities  Erupted out of the cavity

Magnified view of a cavity    Full size view (large file)

Coronal smoke stack also spicules and prominences in 3D

"Stalk" filaments

Prominences in 3D. Full sun view (large file)

Stereoscopic failure

Solar flares May 2007 - GOES class C

Before the first flare: Stereoscopic anaglyph, May 1st and 2nd, showing stressed flux tubes above the sun-spot. Also coronal "pillars." Flare 20070502 showing diffraction spikes.

Solar flare May 5, 2007: post flare loop and "solar tsunami" - a sunspot-related filament eruption. Includes subtraction also 3d movie (900kb) 2D Flash movie (2.09mb) and H-alpha gif movie by Gema Araujo. Interpretation Jan Janssens

Difference between Moreton wave, EIT wave, solar tsunami and CME

Solar flare May 16, 2007  20070516. Includes a gif, anaglyphic, stereoscopic movie of the flare EIT shock wave.

20070609 STEREO during M class flare
Compare H alpha by P-M Hedén with 171Å during M class flare

Stereoscopic technical problems of the STEREO mission

There are a few prominences projecting from the solar edge. Prominences are relatively cool plasma, supported above the photosphere in a magnetic cavity at the junction line between magnetic domains of opposite polarity.

cavities in 3D .

On the solar face in H-alpha images, a prominence is seen as a dark filament,

On 304Å ultraviolet images, disc filaments are hard to see. Filaments show better in 3D, because they sit above the surrounding plasma.

304Å images show a lot of "bubbles" (not a recognised term - peculiar to kiwizone!) These "bubbles" are a pain when sequential SOHO images are converted to 3D, because after 6 hours they have changed so much that stereoscopic correlation fails. STEREO images are taken simultaneously by the two satellites and now, at last, I can see bubbles in 3D.

The "bubbles" seem to form above super-granule boundaries on the photosphere, where the magnetic field is concentrated. The convecting plasma (ionised gas), which boils up to make the middle of super-granules on the photosphere, sweeps the magnetic field lines to the granule boundary, before sinking back into the solar convection zone. In the process the magnetic field lines become concentrated and jam together in the "cracks" between adjacent super-granules, forcing spicules of plasma up into the chromosphere. Others say the spicules are forced up by sound waves (see helioseismology).

Rather higher up, it seems to me, these spicules probably heat the transient "bubbles" in the coronal transition zone . Skylab pictures in multiple wavelengths around the temperature of the transition zone revealed these bubbles were really vertical columns of plasma, rather than round bubbles. Study this 3D picture, which also reveals the bubbles have depth.

The left hand active region included a pair of sunspots which produced a solar flare 1 day later.

Black coronal holes show well in x-ray. In 3D we can look through holes in the high "clouds" to see x-ray bright spots lower down. Bright spots are not related to active regions. They turn on and off, so the spots we see after 12 hours are not necessarily the same spots in the two images used for the stereo pair, as you can tell by blinking each eye in turn.

Even at sunspot minimum, magnetic storms and auroras occur on earth.
Despite no CME's or solar flares, the fast solar wind interferes with earth's magnetic field.
Coronal holes emit the fast solar wind.
Fast wind from polar holes miss our earth. (North hole is large here, South is almost absent)
At sunspot minimum, coronal holes are common nearer the solar equator and these can bombard Earth with very fast, high energy, electrons.
The greater than 2 MeV electron flux at geosynchronous orbit reached high levels during 03 - 06 September and 08 - 09 September 2007 due to this coronal hole.

Hinode (Solar B) is a single satellite, not a pair of satellites. Stereoscopic images are only possible by waiting for the sun to rotate. Stereoscopic SOHO images on this web site and H alpha 3D images taken by amateur solar photographers depend on solar rotation for stereoscopic parallax. Stereoscopic depth impression depends on the time between images. For the 2006 Hinode image, I used a 12 hour pause (about 7 degrees solar rotation). The September 2007 image used 6 hours . You can easily see the difference in 3D.

Hinode is a Japanese mission developed and launched by ISAS/JAXA, with NAOJ as domestic partner and NASA and STFC (UK) as international partners. It is operated by these agencies in co-operation with ESA and NSC (Norway).

.

Solar Dynamics Observatory

Link