On Saturday, September 24, 2011, at 09:40 UT, most of the folks working for NASA were probably asleep. But NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory never sleeps: it's only job is to stare at the Sun, 24 hours a day, every day. Good thing it does, too, because it caught a pretty decent-sized solar flare erupting from the Sun's disk at that time:
[embed width="610"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VQbsnGdxDQ[/embed]
Isn't that awesome? Make sure you set the resolution to at least 720p
and make it full screen for the full effect. The flare was technically class X1.9, which is at the low end of the highest category of flare power
. It blasted out radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum (this animation shows the Sun in the far-ultraviolet), and probably released at least as much energy as a billion one-megaton bombs. Good thing we're 150 million kilometers away. Yegads. The flickering threw me for a sec, but ...
