CME Bursts: Harbingers of Activity to Come? (March 12, 2010)
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The Sun showed some signs of life recently (Mar. 6-10, 2010) with two good-sized coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and several minor ones. SOHO captured the action with its C2 coronagraph in which the sun is blocked out (by the circular occulting disk in the center of the image) to reveal the faint structures in the corona. The white circle represents the size of the Sun. With a small rise in activity levels, the sun seems to be slowly emerging from the extended solar minimum. These eruptions were not Earth-directed, so there was only a slight chance any impact would be felt here at Earth.
SOHO began its Weekly Pick some time after sending a weekly image or video clip to the American Museum of Natural History (Rose Center) in New York City. There, the SOHO Weekly Pick is displayed with some annotations on a large plasma display.
If your institution would also like to receive the same Weekly Pick from us for display (usually in Photoshop or QuickTime format), please send your inquiry to steele.hill@gsfc.nasa.gov.