25th of February 2011 , 5:09 UT - Strange solar activity or satelitte anomaly?

I check the solar activity pretty much every day for quite some years now. Today , I watched this "ahead" video from the STEREO sats:

stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov...

However, something like a bizarre flash got my attention at 5:09 AM!
Please take a look at this picture,framing exactly 5:09

stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov...

I am not sure how this could be explained as a satellite anomaly, it looks very strange , as the flare appears to happen after the 5:09 frame..

Stereo "Behind" appears to be very blurry in order to spot something unusual, so the Ahead satellite is the only one displaying the anomaly. Very interesting, so opinions would probably clarify the issue.

Edit to add - it could be that the sunspot is actually ejecting material at incredible high speeds?

reply to post by Romanian


NIce find. And what is the bright shiny ball in the still pic up top left? Anomoly?

Wow, that is crazy. Wish I had the expertise to offer theories but I don't have a clue what to think. S&F for you my friend, let's hope it's not something out of the ordinary.

reply to post by Romanian


double post

here we go, the pictures from STEREO Behind also display somehow the flash. I guess it was a coronal mass ejection, however the speed is not something we see every day !

Here we go ,
stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov...

then

stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov...

and finally

stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov...

I will call it a cosmic bullet. It would be interesting to calculate the speed of this CME!

Good investigation work. I do the same daily as to running the solar intel sites several times a day. I often wonder tho if the supplied intel is valid they supply from the official sites. All the same i dont own my own satillite so i just have to rely on whats available. I am happy to see others like you are on the job and it helps when a team is on the project watching the same activity from the sun. We are heading to a very important time refering to the solar max and the ride i believe will be a wild one this time around. Keep up the on going watch.

reply to post by bjsmi2


Thank you for your appreciation, i do enjoy monitoring the solar activity indeed.So, what is your "take" in this? Iv been watching the solar activity data since 2007,not enough to see how a maximum should look and feel... In my opinion , this bullet CMA is at least 10 times faster than normal..if we have a bullet CME, of course..

You are looking at the "beacon mode" images from the STEREO satellites. These are low resolution, highly compressed images.

Shown here are the latest SECCHI beacon images. The STEREO space weather beacon telemetry mode is a very low rate, highly compressed data stream broadcast by the spacecraft 24 hours per day. These data are used for space weather forecasting. Because of the large compression factors used, these beacon images are of much lower quality than the actual science data.

stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov...

It usually takes two or three days for the high quality images to be posted. When they are, many of the artifacts are resolved.

What appears in
stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov...
seems to be debris from the spacecraft. It can be seen from time to time.
stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov...

reply to post by Phage


thank you for your explanation. I will wait for the h-res pictures then, somehow I believe the event is related to the solar activity.It could be a very fast CME creating compression artefacts. a question - will the H-res pictures be available on the exactly same link? thanks again!

reply to post by Romanian

No.
Those links will die. You will need to use the search form to find the high quality images.

reply to post by Phage


The artifacts on your link appears to be somewhat different from the picture posted above.

and often appear as "donut" shapes in the COR1 and COR2 telescopes

The donut shape must be due to the close proximity to the telescope , a form of optical interference..
i guess it is not micrometeorites impacting the Cor2 , i wonder what that is!

reply to post by Romanian

Revisit the image in a day or so.
The high quality image will appear quite different.

The higher resolution picture is now available:
stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov...

You might be interested in reading this section and learning about the images.
Image Artifacts