Rising Rainbow
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Shortly after producing an M2 Flare on 25 July 1999, active region AR8693 gave rise to a beautiful display, captured by the Coronal Diagnostic Spectrometer (CDS). The bright red-white areas shown in the movie reveals the tops of post-flare loops with temperatures of between 1 to 3 million K. Beneath it are numerous, highly dynamic cool loops (blue).
The CDS instrument observes in many different wavelengths at once. However, each exposure only captures a narrow north-south slice through a slit. Images are formed by scanning across a part of the Sun using multiple exposures. Thus, images in many different wavelengths are generated simultaneously, as shown below:
The emission line images of Oxygen (O V), Magnesium (Mg IX) and Iron (Fe XVI), corresponding to 3 different temperatures: 250,000 K (blue), 1 million K (green) and 2.5 million K (red), were selected from the original image (below) to produce multicolor composites, and a series of the multicolor images were combined to form a movie.
Related links
- Coronal Diagnostic Spectrometer (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory)
Picture credits: SOHO/CDS Instrument: CDS (Coronal Diagnostic Spectrometer)