SOHO: The Best Coronal Mass Ejection Images in 2002: A Retrospective

Hi-resolution images:
2002/01/14 (TIF, 1.5M),
2002/07/19 (TIF, 1.6M)
2002/08/24 (TIF, 1.6M),
2002/12/02 (TIF, 1.4M)

Movies:

MPEG Movie ( 1.8M), smaller version ( 543k)

Quicktime Movie ( 928k), smaller version ( 341k)

Over the year, although we are on the downward slope after having
passed the peak of solar activity, solar storms (either solar flares
or coronal mass ejections) occur on the Sun almost every day. Most
of these are considered rather minor. But strong, visually stunning
blasts still occur fairly frequently. Here is a retrospective of
nine images from storms taken by the LASCO C2 instrument. Most of
these images have never been highlighted before, but, grouped
together in this series, one can appreciate the variety, size, and
power of these blasts. In all instances with this instrument the Sun
is more than blocked out by an occulting disk so that the instrument
can see activity in the corona, which is 100 times less bright than
the Sun, and perhaps a million times less bright than the Sun when
observed from near Earth (where SOHO is).