Extracting Solar Physics from 151 Million EUV Images
Abstract
Beginning in 2010, the Solar Dynamics Observatory's Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (SDO AIA) revolutionized solar imaging with its high temporal and spatial resolution and coverage. The archive of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) images is now over 150 million and continues to grow. Automated algorithms consistently clean these images to remove magnetospheric particle impacts on the CCD cameras, but it has been found that compact, intense solar brightenings are often removed as well. There are now over 3 trillion "spiked pixels" that have been removed from EUV images. We estimate that 0.001% of those are of solar origin and removed by mistake - an unexplored dataset of about 30 million events. We take a novel approach and survey the entire set of AIA "spike" data to identify and group compact brightenings across the entire SDO mission. We then use the spike database to form statistics on compact solar brightenings without having to process large volumes of full-disk AIA data. The qualities of the "spikes" with a solar origin represent the most complete archive of compact EUV bright points ever assembled.
- Publication:
-
Catalyzing Solar Connections
- Pub Date:
- November 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018csc..confE..88K