The month the earth stood still

Some have been wondering why it looks like Earth is barely moving from STEREO Ahead COR2 lately. Actually the answer is quite straight forward if you think about the orbit of Earth vs the orbit of STEREO Ahead (they're very similar), but in this video I take it a step further and directly determine how Earth should appear to move relative to the sun as seen from STEREO Ahead.

Here is the resulting spreadsheet to calculate the angular separation of earth from the sun as seen from STEREO Ahead:
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As you can see, earth will shortly be going behind the sun from STEREO's perspective, which is why the image quality is so terrible right now. Low bandwidth, they're actually having to point STEREO's antenna away from earth and the sun a bit to keep the temperature of the feed horn at a safe level. In a few months earth will be so close to the sun from STEREO's perspective (and vice versa from earth's perspective) that communications will be completely impossible for a period of time. And because of how slowly earth is moving relative to the sun from STEREO, this blackout period will be quite prolonged I'm sorry to say. At one point STEREO will literally be behind the sun from earth's perspective but will be unable to transmit data to us until it emerges from the other side and clears the sun by about 2 degrees.