STORM SIGNALS
From Satellites: GOES movies
Live Data
GOES movies (web site)
A complete list of real-time data links is located in the Space Weather Resources section.
The GOES-12 satellite produces x-ray images of the Sun. This site provides movies of these images from periods ranging from a day to a month. This is a great way to scan a large period of time for significant solar events. These images also show you exactly where a flare occurred. This site is a great resource tool. When you first open the page you will see the following.
The top blue table offers movies of the current day and the current month updated every hour. The second blue table offers movies 12 hour and 54 day movies. If you have a slow Internet connection, it will be important to look at the size of the file (second column) before you download. The third and fourth columns give the start and end dates and time.
For research purposes you will want to choose a date in the brown box at the top. Select the year, month and day and click on Find Movies. The top blue box will give you the movies you want for that period. Look at the start and end dates and time carefully.
TEACHER'S NOTE
Sometimes you and your students will see a strange, dark band across the Sun like the one in the image below. There is also a dark area over a bright spot above the diagonal line.
These occur when a solar flare produces such intense bursts of x-ray that the camera is overloaded and the signals 'spills over' to adjacent pixels. In this case there was a large bright flare and a smaller one above it. The overload partially blocks the bright spot.
- NASA Official: Dr. James Thieman
- Project Manager: Don Robinson-Boonstra
- Website Manager: Bryan Stephenson