Solar Report Essay

Submitted By jakebarrutia
Words: 618
Pages: 3

Jake Barrutia
Astronomy 150
Sun and Solar Activity Report

In this particular activity, we were asked to use solar observing tools in order to find evidence that either supports or rejects the hypothesis that solar activity is caused by distortions in the sun’s magnetic field. Such activity includes sunspots, solar flares, and coronal mass ejections. There are countless speculations and predictions about why such incredible phenomena occur on the sun’s surface. However, if one simply believes that theory without contracting data and evidence for themselves, then they are being unintelligent. So while the basis of this activity was to gather evidence to support or reject the working hypothesis, it was also an activity that taught us to think for ourselves and to come up with self reported conclusive evidence. During the first part of the procedure, I went to the link that displayed the images of the sun from different views. I compared the EIT images, the continuum images, and the magnetogram images. After recording my observations from these comparisons, I proceeded to go to the helio viewer website. From this website, I was able to pull up different images of the sun from different dates and observe any solar activity. I changed the viewing instruments to observe multiple images; I viewed the sun from the EIT instrument, the MDI instrument, and the LASCO instrument. There was a lot of solar activity to be observed and recorded from each of these viewing instruments, which I did. I particularly was on the lookout for sunspots, solar flares, magnetic anomalies and coronal mass ejections. During my observations of these images, I also took screenshots of several images that I thought were particularly interesting. I took screenshots from the views of various viewing instruments. After I finished viewing completely, I additionally compared the solar phenomena of these images by creating a movie, using the various viewing instruments to do so. After creating the movie, I used my observations and recordings to come to a conclusion about the given hypothesis.
While observing the different images on the helio viewer website, I found excessive solar activity on several of the images. From one of LASCO images on October 27th at 11:30 A.M., I observed a large solar flare on the eastern hemisphere of the sun. When I pulled up the magnetogram of the sun from the same time as I observed the flare, I observed a cluster of sunspots on the eastern hemisphere of