>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
[ Pause ]   >> I'm Jennifer Harbster.

I'm a Digital Reference Specialist with the Science, Technology
and Business Division here at the Library of Congress.
I'd like to welcome you to today's program, The Many Colors of the Sun.
This program is the second in a series of programs in 2011 presented
through a partnership between our division
and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
And this is our 5th year presenting with Goddard.
Our speaker today, Dr. Dean Pesnell is the project scientist
at Goddard Solar Dynamics Observatory or SDO.
Before his present career as a physicist and investigator
of the Sun, he first learned about sizzling and fiery hot things
as a Burger King French fries specialist.
[ Laughter ]   >> And it's true.

He moved from the culinary arts
to science receiving his bachelor degree in physics at the University
of Delaware and has doctorate in physics
from the University of Florida.
Dr. Pesnell has published 80 papers and probably
over 80 papers I'd imagine by now,
in several research areas including variable stars, the sun,
earth connection, quantum mechanics, and meteors
and planetary atmospheres.
As many of you know, space weather ands solar flares can affect our
technology tools here on Earth,
especially our GPS systems and mobile phones.
I for one, when I have problems with my mobile phone or my cable,
I will usually blame them on solar flares.
For me, it's a less stressful to blame things like that on the sun
than to call up my cellphone provider.
Luckily, we have the SDO folks to study and understand the causes
of solar variability and its impacts here on Earth.
The SDO is the first mission
in NASA's science program called Living with a Star.
It is the largest solar observing spacecraft placed in orbit,
and the images and data it is sending back are pretty astonishing
as you could see here.
From what I have read, the images are 10 times greater in resolution
than are high definition, definition televisions.
We are very fortunate to have Dr. Pesnell here today to share
with us the data and images coming from SDO.
So I think we should get started and welcome Dr. Pesnell.
[ Applause ]   [ Pause ]

>> Okay, so the data I'm displaying here is the last two days
of the sun, or the previous two days of the sun
which is a more positive way to think about it.
[Laughter] And it updates every half hour so that you're all--
you could be 15 minutes to a half hour, maybe 45 minutes behind.
But it does it automatically so you don't have to do any work.
And we call this our kiosk movies and this turns out to be one
of our favorite displays.
As a matter of fact, this link right here, is one of our--
it shows six of these panels.
I can't do it on my laptop 'cause it doesn't have a screen for it.
We encourage you all to use SDO data that's a great resource
and we'll just gonna talk a little bit about why we use--
why we need SDO and what we've learned from SDO so far as soon
as my laptop-- there we go, okay.
We have studied the sun since we were very young, as a civilization.
The Babylonians in the upper right hand corner there, that's their--
that's a representation of their sun god.
And if I'm incorrect, too bad, okay?
It's some god from that area of the world, maybe not,
maybe it's the Chaldeans but-- on the left is a more typical view
of the sun that we have today.
And in this case, it's also ambiguous.
Who here thinks that's a sunrise and who here thinks it's a sunset?
It's very difficult to distinguish between the two.
And I don't know, I stole it from the web.
But in any event, that's what we think about the sun today.
It's a source of weather, it's a source of our timing, a day,
a night, a year, whereas we're still there.
We're still worried about the sun.   The sun shows up in art.

In the lower left, we have a picture of we think a solar eclipse
by an artist named Juan [inaudible].
And he had a whole book of these that they're really cool to look
at and this is my favorite.
On the lower right, we have what are called parhelia.
These are sun dogs.
We'll see a sun dog in a picture of SDO's launch
so I thought I'd introduce them now.   The sun dog is this right here.

Where's mine, there it is.
This thing right here, and then there's another one over here
that are symmetric, about 23 degrees from the sun,
and they're called sun dogs.
They are just one of the many different kinds
of parhelia you can have.   And then in the background,

it's probably what started people doing astronomy.
That's the solar eclipse.
That's where the moon passes in front of the sun
and because they have the same angular size on the sun
as does your thumb by the way, you hold your thumb up like this,
it also causes eclipse, don't practice.
It's better to do that on the moon.
That's probably why we got astronomy because we had these times
where for a few minutes the sun was completely taken away.
And if your religion is based on the sun and it disappears,
you have some issues in your religion.
So being able to predict when solar eclipse is when happening
and whether they're gonna happen at this point, place on the Earth,
became an essential part of many early astronomers until the 1600s.
In the 1600s, they invented a thing called a telescope.
Galileo may be credited with that.   He did not invent it.

Galileo may be credited with discovering sunspots, he did not.
But he did leave us a set of beautiful diagrams
of the sunspots that he saw.   And these are in June of 1613.

These are not the first ones but these are a good set
that the Galileo Project at Rice University has taken
and put into a little animation.
And so, this is about two months where we've got six weeks
of data draw-- taken from the drawings of Galileo.
And when you plot them up, you'll notice what happens.
The sunspots move.   And this is a big issue at the time.

Remember what is the sun, it's a religious symbol.
The sun is perfect except for those eclipses.
And now somebody comes along and says, there are blotches on the sun.
And there was a great deal of work at that time to prove
that these were planets orbiting within,
you know, between us and the sun.
But you obviously, you don't think that's gonna be a planet if you do
that for a while, or maybe you just saw one spot you could say is
a planet.
But if you watch them for a while, they change in size,
they change in shape, they move across the sun all at the same rate.
There are some in the top, there are some in the bottom.
So, this becomes a conundrum for the astronomers at that time.
And they studied this but they don't let anybody really know about it.
This is a real issue when we go back and--
in trying to find these early observations.
They're often-- they're not the kind of things that got publicly accessed
at the time because people were basically told they weren't allowed
to study it.
The big problem is of course they didn't disappear.
About 30 years later, they stopped being-- that's another thing.
Alright. The next advance after our drawing is they start taking
pictures of the sun.
Now, the sun is a source of much of our science just like it's a source
of conundra in our religions.
It's a source of science because it's the brightest thing in the sky.
And if you're building things like telescope,
so if you're studying things like quantum mechanics,
then the sun is the best place to go look 'cause it's bright
and you can see the stuff you wanna look at.
It's not until the mid 20th century that we build light sources
that can compete with the sun in brightness.
Here is one of the first photographs ever taken.
This is a couple of years after the actual first.
These are photographs of the sun and it's actually in fact a lousy focus.
You would think they could do better.
But if you ever go back and see what they are doing,
you find out that it's pretty good that they will take this picture.
And guess what, sunspots, they're still there.
Nowadays, we look at the sun in very narrow filters.
We're able to do that because the sun is very bright
and this is a filter of hydrogen that's in the visible spectrum.
We can use this from the ground.
And when you look at the sun and hydrogen light,
you find out that the sun is nowhere near as simple as it is
from your eye which is a very broadband kind of--
it's an RGB kind of sense.
These are very narrow colors, it's much narrower
than you could see with your eye.
And all of a sudden you started seeing a lot of other stuff.
We've been doing this for about a hundred years now.
This is-- these are relatively high quality pictures.
You see bright areas on the sun if you actually look at the sun,
now would be where our sunspot is.
But the thing that I like is you see these long regions of dark.
>> These are called filaments and this is another part
of the sun's magnetic field that we're going to look at with SDO.
Now, that brings us up to about the 1950's.
I'm gonna skip half a century and just show you what SDO use.
This is the first 7 months of SDO science data taken
about once an hour from May 1st till some time I believe it's
in early November.   This is in three bands of light

than the [inaudible] extreme ultra violet.
You cannot see this with your eye.   That's good.

[Laughter] I mean you could see it with your eye
but your eye would not last.
This is a kind of way of radiation that goes in
and it actually is destructive when it goes into your eye.
We use normal CCDs to look at it but it's not good for organic material.
There're three of them and they're all about 1 million Kelvin which is
about 2 million Fahrenheit in temperature.
So when you look at this, you should think I'm looking at material that's
about 2 million Fahrenheit, pretty hot stuff.
When it's dark, that means there's nothing there
and you can just see a dark cap that was on the top
of the sun just went away.
And you can see the dark material coming back around.
You see an active region.
It looks like a spider kind of thing moving
across the middle of the screen.   You see this dark thing.

This is the sun at solar minimum.
I mean we looked at this, we started saying, "Wow, people really miss,
you know, when you just have zero sunspot number,
you can still have a lot of fantastic stuff.
Big eruptions coming off the sun and if I got my talk synced
up with the slides, with the movie,
I could tell you all the little eruptions that take place.
Why do we care?
We care because when the sun does something, when the sun burps
or hiccups, so here comes something, an ejection coming off the sun
and it moves to the Earth and it interacts with the Earth,
these lines that you see here are the Earth's magnetic field sitting
out in space, and as that material moves by that magnetic field,
it distorts the magnetic field and changes it.
And as a result, it makes the pretty aurora.
It's a great little movie.
The sun burps and the Earth gets pretty aurora.
And if that was all that was here, I wouldn't be here
because the only people that would care would be Norwegians
and Canadians.
[Laughter] And maybe some Alaskans, okay?
So, we have more important things to worry about.
We have satellites.
We have a large infrastructure depends on radio waves.
We have people that everyday want to get in an airplane
and go over to the Far East.   I forgot my-- I'm sorry.

And in April of 2011, we have one of those satellites get disturbed
by some solar activity and it started blundering
around in the geosynchronous satellite belt.
And when we say "blunder" we mean blunder.
It was just going wherever it felt like.
It was not moving in one dir--
it turned out it just moves in one direction more or less
but there are other satellites in the way.
And as this thing moves around, they had to take all
of the active satellites and kind of do a dance.
So as this moved around the belt, the other satellites had to move
in towards us and move out so that satellite could slide by.
Eventually, it went into eclipse on the solar panels, restarted
and now they've recovered it.   Now, you're on the panel.

Would you let them put that back in position and start it back up?
I mean that thing caused angst for 6 months as it blunder
around in the geosynchronous belt.
And if you, you know, we're all on the panel that was going to vote
on giving them their slot back, what would you say?
No, I don't want them there.   Okay. I work at NASA.

We will lose satellites-- well, we don't lose satellites.
Our satellites are perfect.
[Laughter] Other people lose satellites.
Galaxies lost two.
There are two up by the top, they lost one back in the late '90s
that caused the virtual end of pager service in the United States,
and apparently it never recovers.
[Laughter] Down below, we have a Canadian satellite called Anik.
And then we have the Japanese ADEOS or Midori.
And they were all four lost because the sun burps or hiccups,
did something and it caused those satellites to get lost.
We have in the middle and the other curves, we have an indicator
of how active the sun is.
And the stuff where it goes up, that's solar maximum.
And when it comes down, that's solar minimum.
We're over there on the right hand side.
We just came out of solar minimum.   And then when we say we're up at

around a hundred, that's what I mean.
This isn't actually sunspot number but it's the thing
that we use for doing satellites.
I do work at NASA and we care about atmospheric drag.
We launched-- I have to make my economic point.
How much of those satellites worth?
I have four pictures kind of vaguely placed on a page.
That's a billion dollars that you lose because the sun did something.
There is the Hubble Space Telescope and the ISS.
They are both in what we call low Earth orbit.
They orbit so close to the Earth
that what we think is a good vacuum is actually--
still has enough air to cause drag on the satellite, drag, steal speed,
it's just like a break, it's just not a very good one.
The ISS falls towards Earth at about 2 kilometers a month.
And so, when they send those space shuttle up there, they--
they put the part of the space shuttle on it
and they fire the space shuttle engines
to boost it up to a higher altitude.
They're gonna have to do that 'cause if you work
that out 2 kilometers a month, it only has 200 kilometers to fall.
That's a hundred months that it has and they have to keep boosting it
up to keep it from falling down.
The Hubble was the one that I actually got into this stuff on.
They hired me to come in and see whether
or not the Hubble was gonna fall to the ground by today.
That was a big concern.   They're early in 2006.

There were some people who said that solar activity
for this cycle was going to be of unprecedented levels of activity.
If that was true, the Hubble would have reentered already.
Okay, it hasn't, still up there.
But nonetheless, they had us convene a panel and decide whether or not
to send another shuttle mission up to boost the Hubble
so that it would stay up another 10 to 20 years.
Our conclusion was they only needed to do one more reboost, not two,
thereby saving the American taxpayer
like canonical number, a billion dollars.
Now, I asked at that time for my finder's fee.
[Laughter] Half a percent, 0.1 percent,
I'm not particular, you know.   I think it's-- it was worth it.

But they said that I was a NASA civil servant
and that should be reward enough.   [Laughter] Alright, we'll skip that.

Anybody ever been on an airplane?
Alright. A couple, a couple of years ago, I got to go to Beijing.
Now, when I was young, I got a globe out and I was told that if I want
to go from Chicago to Beijing, you put a string at Chicago
and you put a string at Beijing and you pull that string tight
and that was the fastest way to go from Chicago to Beijing.
I did bring a globe but I forgot to inflate.
So you'll just have to imagine that if we flatten that trajectory out,
that's the blue line, okay?
Now, back before 1999, there was this country called
at one point the Soviet Union and later Russia, and you'll notice
that that blue line goes from Chicago out over Canada
over the Arctic Ocean and then to Russia.
At that time, they were shooting planes
down if they flew into that space.
That's not good for commercial air flight.
[Laughter] So they had to fly the red line from Chicago over here
to Alaska, and in on down to Kamchatka and Korea
and then eventually into Beijing.
If you see that big broad line, yeah,
that's my interpretation of the jet stream.
I'm a solar physicist.
The jet stream to me is a very simple object that's just an arrow.
[Laughter] But what the jet stream represents is several hundred mile
an hour headwinds.
And if you'll notice, that red line flies along the arrow amazingly
enough for a long part of its trajectory
and that slows the plane down.
Basically, the plane is going 500 miles an hour this way
and the wind is going 200 miles an hour that way.
The net result is the plane is only going 300 miles an hour.
It slows the plane down.   It actually made that flight a--

you had to stop an anchorage to refuel, it took so long.
In 1999, United Airlines who provided these slides,
so I mean that-- I mean they are concerned about this a lot.
They came up with this idea, you fly through the jet streams,
go to the North Pole, hang a left,
fly south 'cause there's no other direction from the North Pole.
Fly south and-- and go through the jet stream again and in both times,
you have avoided headwinds.
And it turns out that by flying a longer distance,
it's about 40 percent longer, you can actually save time.
That's a great idea and United and now others, United started this
in the early 2000s and other airlines have followed suit.
And now they actually have all these.
If you ignore the blue line and the red line, those were the ones
that I drew on the previous one.
We have about 5 ways to get up to the North Pole
and take your left turn and come
down into the other side of the world.
Trouble is that yellow circle.
If the sun is active, you're not allowed
to fly in that yellow circle.
You're out of contact with your radio at that point,
and solar activity blankets that part
of the world so you can't fly there.   >> And that means you're back

to flying either the great circle route or the pre-1999.
And it cost them, you know, I would like to be able
to say it cost a billion dollars a flight, but it does.
It caused about a quarter million a flight if they have to divert
and go down the southern route.
So they really want to know what the sun is going
to be doing throughout a 14 hour flight so they really want
to know what the sun is gonna be doing
between 5 and 10 hours from now.
They want a prediction and that is what they are expecting


There's one last thing I have to talk about.
I see solar activity everywhere now.
The Big Bang Theory which I guess isn't surprising.
After all, that's a bunch of nerds.
You know, it actually is very realistic except for one--
one part, that the beautiful woman that talks to the nerds,
that's not realistic at all.
[Laughter] I was in graduate school in physics, I know that.
And one of the episodes, Sheldon is trying to hide something.
He goes out and he comes back and he say, well, he got lost.
Okay, so with Sheldon, you always carry your GPS even to walk
around the block and says, "Yes, there was a solar flare
and I got lost because it disrupted my GPS."
It was great for me, I love these things.
The Simpsons has done it.
But the thing that has really brought the solar activity,
especially the predictions of solar activity
to the forefront is the distortions of next year, 2012.
Okay. There are-- there are these apocalyptic end
of the world predictions related to a calendar that's
so accurate they don't know when it started to within a thousand years.
But next year on December 20th, there is gonna be a problem, okay?
They don't know when this--
that calendar started to within a thousand years.
But next year on December 20, something is gonna happen.
And so, whenever I do an interview now about solar activity,
at least one question is gonna be related to this,
the apocalyptic visions that people are having for next year.
My vision is that this is great.
It has brought solar activity to the forefront that's made a lot
of people aware of what's going on.
But don't use my data to back up these predictions
because it's just not going to go there.
So, we're in the common literature.
We're there, we're on TV, we're in movies.
I mean the movie is 2012 or the movie 2012 probably made more money
than I will ever made a billion dollars.
[Laughter] I mean I would like to get a share of this pie.
They're using my predictions.
But I thought I would since I'm at the Library of Congress,
that maybe you guys still read books.
And I'll have you know that Mark Twain, you may have heard of him,
Samuel Clemens to you, right?   He was-- he actually has a book

about gaining solar activity to-- to make money in grain.
Because if the sun changes the weather,
if the solar cycle changes the weather,
then knowing what the solar cycle is doing means I could tell you what
the wheat price is gonna be next year.
And more importantly if I can control it
and he's gonna sell shares at a company that control the sun,
to control the weather, to control the wheat prices.
So there are-- there are these literary references are all over.
They all want predictions.
A United pilot wants to know what's gonna happen today, hours.
They actually get reports that in part our data help support,
done by a government agency in Boulder, Colorado called SWPC
and they produced these alerts,
that the pilots need to go over the poles.
The guys that do satellites, they wanna know what's gonna happen
for the next couple of months so they can plan out,
do I have to worry about things.
And the solar cycle guys, they want things that go forever.
They want me to tell them what the solar cycle did back
when they were building Stonehenge so that they can find out whether
or not there are some alignment
at Stonehenge related to solar activity.
That's kind of fun, that's not really what I care about.
I care about the Hubble and my finder's fee.
Okay. We don't use them anymore.   We use computer models.

[Laughter] This is a computer model.
This is what we would like to understand.
Those are the sunspots on the sun
and then we're gonna split the sun apart
and show you what the sunspots come from the solar magnetic field.
Those lines are kind of hard to explain.
But if you see a lot of them close together, that's a strong field.
If you don't see very many close together, it's a weak field.
So all you really need to know and you'll notice
that the strong field is virtually all down deep inside the sun.
Guess what, we can't see there very easily.
We see this stuff on the outside easily but that's a very--
it's just like the tip of the iceberg
for what's going on inside the sun.
And this is one of the better models for the solar magnetic field.
We call it the solar dynamo but it's one of the better models
and not just because I helped.   Okay. What are we gonna use?

We need data.
This is like weather forecasting all of a sudden.
We need data because we need to know what the sun is doing now,
we need to know what it did before, and we need to make a model,
predict what's happening and then get data to come back
and tell us what it did and then you correct your model and try again.
The weather forecasters have been doing that for 60 years


That usually works.
[Laughter] And we would like to emulate the weatherman
and give ourselves career long work to do this.
SDO was launched on February 10th or 11th, 2010,
from the Kennedy Space Flight Center.
You guys were up here in 4 feet of snow,
we were down in Florida and boy was it cold.
SDO is now in an inclined geosynchronous orbits
at about the longitude of New Mexico and we are in continuous contact
with the spacecraft so that data we get is coming down constantly.
That's why we can do that kiosk movie and tell you the data is
about a half hour old because we get the data every 3 minutes sent off
to the right place and it takes a while to propagate
through all the data system.   We have about a 5-year mission.

We at least 10 years from all the other issues we have and 900 years
of propellant, so we're in good shape for the propellant.
[Laughter] Okay, we had a great launch.
You wish you were there, because I didn't have to shovel any snow.
And these are images from SDO.
This was not made before launch, this was made after launch.
It took off.
That's our Atlas V. We got a little model of it that we had out front
and as it lifted off, we saw one of those sun dogs.
I was lifting my binoculars to follow the trajectory
and a sun dog came into view.
And see those ripples going away, the sun dog disappeared
as a result of those ripples.
And it's probably the first time in history and that's not just me now.
I mean that we actually did have some atmospheric ice halo experts,
a parhelia perfectionist.
And as prior the first time, we've seen one those things change
as a result of something mandate, so it's kind of cool
and I have a student that got to work on it,
and that was a lot of fun.
But more importantly, we started opening our instruments.
This is the first day of observations
from what we call the AIA instrument,
the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly.
And you'll notice that nothing exceptional happened.
Okay, all we had was this incredibly beautiful erupting prominence.
And as we pull back from it, you'll see--
and if the lights that they have on, you know, to--
so that people in the web cast can see me,
the lights are denying you the full impact of the image that you have.
But that was our first flight.
It's only gotten better since, but I need to talk for just a few minutes
about how we're showing you the data.
We don't show you things in false-color, we just make it up.
I mean we're lying to you on these colors.
They have nothing to do with the data that we show you, we--
but they are coded so that when we see an image,
we kinda know what it is.
I mean that's the only important thing is that when we see an image,
we can say that's an AIA 304 or AIA 193.
We're not looking to do any other representation.
This isn't like trying to do true color on Mars or something
like that, we're just lying to you.
And the other thing we're gonna do is we're gonna show you a lot
of stop action movies because what we do is we take pictures fairly
quickly, AIA takes a picture in each color every 12 seconds
and then we basically take them and show them to you as a flip show
and it looks like an animation.   They're stop action.

We're being open and above board with this.
We just do it because it looks cool
and it's how your eye is a great thing to look
at these movies 'cause it sees things--
it sees things in the movies very readily.
So the goal is that you get to watch them [inaudible].
Let's go through our false-colors.   That looks like the sun, right?

Alright, I'm lying to you.   That should be blue.

Okay, this image actually is lying.
This is a false-color that's taken at blue
but they make it yellow 'cause that's what everybody expects.
This is taken in it for a reason.
You'll see those two dark spots up at the top in the yellow.
Now they're still dark but you'll notice there's some other stuff
showed up.
There's a little bit cooler temperature.
I have the temperature down on the lower right,
so I forgot to tell you what it is.   I can be reminded.

It's a little warmer and you're seeing some bright stuff.
Alright, now you're starting to see the old man in the sun.
Okay, he's got his eyes up top, his mouth down below.
This is helium, this is our favorite color.
>> Here are some favorite, my favorite one.
And then we move into even hotter temperatures.
You know those things I said was about a million 0.61
and 2 million Kelvin and that's to be multiplied
up by 1.8 for Fahrenheit.
We move up even hotter and then our hottest channel is 10
million Kelvin.   This is pretty dang hot stuff.

What's that?   Wait a minute, it's not color.

Oh yeah, it is.   It's black and white.

We could have done this back in the '50s.
[Laughter] This is what we call the magnetic field of the sun
and in this case the magnetic field of the sun
where it's white is pointing towards you
and whereas black is pointing away from you.
Magnetic field has a direction.   We have to keep track of that.

You'll notice that the magnetic field up around those places
that were dark, there they are.
Right around here, you'll notice that there's black
and white next to each other.
Over here, there is black and white next to each other
and down here there's this long thing of black
and a long thing of white.   They're not kind of mixed up.

They're kind of separate.
In the south-- that's the southern hemisphere
and it's just the way the south has been as we came out solar minimum.
The north solar development of sunspots
and the south held up for quite a while.
I made this last week.
We've been working on these dual movies.
I like the little spray that happens
over in the upper right hand corner if you watch over here.
Over here we'll see a spray-- these are all the spray there.
That's just material being ejected from the sun,
is being pushed off not quite as exciting as a prominence eruption
but still it's material going off.
And then I have it off on this side, if you look at the same region,
you can almost look like lightning going from here to here.
You see the loops.
They're almost like lightning joining those two pieces of the sun.
Now we're used to things being joined together.
With AIA, we're starting to-- and the SDO data, we're starting to see
that those joins happen over much larger parts of the sun
than we realize would be normal.
We expected I mean some cases but we're starting to see that the sun
in one part over here is actually joined to here and over here,
so we're seeing the sun kind of as all these little islands
of magnetic field but those islands are joined
by these loops that go between them.
You did mention the HDTV, so here is our attempt to show you--
actually you're probably all American tax dollars.
This is your tax dollars at work and so it's always good
to show you what you're getting for your money.
Over here, you'll notice that I have a young person doing my web stuff.
That's his standard TV.
[Laughter] Long time ago, that's what TV looked like.
And then we have with the-- one of the first long-term missions
of the study of the sun called SOHO.   It's still up there.

It's been up there almost 16 years now
and that was what we call 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels.
And then we have your standard 1080 high-definition television,
it's 1080 pixels this way and 1920 that way.
Stereo and other satellite is 2 by-- by 2000 by 2000 and then we're 4000
by 4000, we're the biggest, therefore we're the best.
The more important thing is that we take data very quickly.
You picked an orbit and we can get data down easily and so we take one
of those pictures every 12 seconds.
Stereo takes one every several minutes.
SOHO took one every 12 minutes, and actually in that wavelength
of helium there, it took one every 6 hours.
So we are able to see things happening in time
that was simply impossible with the earlier datasets.
Okay, like this flare right here.   That's our first X-class player.

It's just like a proud papa.
X2.2 happened on Valentines Day our time, a little early in the morning
on February 15th in UT clock.
The flare is a little bright spot in the middle.
Contrary to all of broadcasters in the United States,
the X-class flare is not the X. Okay, that's just a problem
with the telescope, there are some reflections in the telescope.
It's the bright thing at the center that's the actual flare.
Who cares?
You do. That flare-- now you can't see it.
Yeah, the contrast, so imagine.
Okay. The flare goes off and a little puff,
almost a smoke ring comes out from the sun.
Why do we care?
If a puff comes off the sun and we see it as a little thing going off
to the side like a stream of water, it's not gonna hit us
and we see it streaming off the other side, it's not gonna hit us.
If we see it looking like it's a round circle, where is it going?
You're looking right down the pipe and that is coming
and it's going to hit the earth.
So this flare goes off Monday night, Valentines Day,
and we're all sitting in our homes texting and twitting
and all these other stuff all
about the flare 'cause we thought it's pretty cool,
our first X-class flare.
And then the CME is seen to be coming towards
where it's called a halo CME 'cause we see it looks
like a halo around the sun.
Well, remember those 2012 guys, big flare,
CME hits the Earth, end of the world.
By Friday, they're all disappointed.   The world didn't end.

And I think they were actually disappointed that--
which in one case I asked an interviewer which would be worse,
you know, the world ending or not.
And I said-- [Laughter] So, I have some mixed feelings
about all this kind of stuff where people take these observations
and tend to over interpret them in terms of some other prophecies or--
and [inaudible] stuff, but unfortunately this one--
or fortunately, well, it depends.   [Laughter] Well, this one missed.

I call it a curveball hiding inside.
Okay, it went behind us and out a little bit above the Earth.
So as it came around, it slowed down a little bit too much,
Earth was able to move out of the way and it went right on by
so that it caused some significant aurora, remember those.
It did cause some beautiful aurora but very little else.
This on the other hand are like, excuse me I clicked
through twice, let me go back.   That one is great.

I mean if you wanna study the sun,
this is the kind of stuff you wanna see.
Okay, remember this is a stop action flick.
As it goes through, it rewinds, all that stuff falls back down on
to the ground or the-- excuse me, the surface of the sun.
And then let's go again.
I call that a trebuchet prominence eruption 'cause it looks
like a trebuchet.   It's even the right color right?

It's throwing pumpkins.   [ Inaudible Remark ]

>> Okay, there it goes again.
That's-- we watched this movie for over an hour when this happened.
I mean Barbara Thompson, the lady that made this movie made
like 20 versions of it and we're just we're watching them all
and it was just-- it illustrates so much
about solar physics in just this one movie.
The rapid motion over there, the billowing of these materials
that moves to the left and then finally the materials slows down
and often it says, oh my god, there's a magnetic field,
and it starts moving in straight lines.
So as long as it's kind of moving into those billows,
it's kind of forgotten there's a magnetic field,
then all of a sudden it slows down just enough that it's--
that fills the magnetic field and it falls back down to the surface.
It's just-- it's just a marvelous example of an eruptive prominence.
And the fact that it kinda looks like a trebuchet is just fun
because I built them with my son.   That's not him.

Okay, we have another [inaudible].   We don't just get beautiful images.

We actually do get scientific data from this satellite.
And one set of data is called dopplergrams.
These are waves moving across the surface of the sun.
We see them in velocity.
We may all have done the Doppler experiments where you have to go out
and listen to a train go by and the train beats goes
up as it comes towards you and goes down.
By the way, when you do that, you stand off the track.
You don't have to stand directly in front of it.
That's a way to ruin the experiment.   We do that over the disk of the sun

and we see these waves rippling across the sun.
We see a lot of other stuff two.
We're gonna talk only about the waves.
And the guy that does this, Phil Scherrer has assured me
that if you seen one dopplergram, you've seen them all.
You've seen two days worth.   Are you done?

>> Uh-hmm.
>> Okay. But by the way, it's not the data.
It's what we can do with that data
that it makes this almost a magical instrument.
And I'm gonna get two examples.   One is we can see all the way

through to the other side of the sun.
The sound wave goes to the other side of the sun and comes back
and because of that, it's affected by what happens on the other side.
And if you do the analysis correctly, and we're almost ready
to prove it, you can actually see sunspots on the far side of the sun.
That's pretty cool.
Remember prediction, the guys that do satellites,
they wanna know what's gonna happen and then,
you know, a couple of weeks.
But guess what, the sun takes 27 days to rotate.
If I can see something on the other side of the sun,
that's given me a week to two weeks warning that something is going
around to the other side of the sun.
This has been-- these far side images have been accepted
by the predictive community for about 10 years now.
They are one of the coolest things that come out in SOHO.
>> We've learned how to do it better, that's what scientists do.
You see great stuff and we just try and make it better and better
and these are just simply getting better.
The HMI data is-- took better data and also the algorithms are--
have been improved over the last 10 years.
So, we're able to look on the Earth side and see things and look
at the far side and in this case see nothing.
Ain't that great?
[Laughter] Okay, if I wanna do solar cycle prediction,
I got to see that magnetic field that was deep,
deep down inside the sun and I can use these waves
to do the same thing.   Those waves dive down to the sun.

And just like they're affected by the stuff on the far side
of the sun, they're affected by what happens when they go deep
down into the sun and I can develop--
these are kind of rivers in the sun.
They're-- and actually the sun looks more like Jupiter
than it does like the Earth.
It has bands that move around it and they take those bands and look
at them and some are moving a little bit faster.
That's what yellow means, and some are moving a little bit slower.
That's what whatever that color is.   I didn't do this part.

It's a pretty ugly color, excuse me.
That band moving down is the thing that we'd like.
This thing started there, right here and moved down
and right along there, if you plotted the sunspots that showed
up in Solar Cycle 23, the one it just did, they would have been at
or above that boundary, and it's an amazing thing to look at that
and say that river inside the sun know something
about sunspots except actually it's probably the other way around.
The sunspots know where to erupt because it's
where that river is happening.
Here is Cycle 24 showing up here in around 2002 or so.
Solar Cycle 24 actually showed up and regardless of what anybody
in the prophecy we all thought, we saw this band coming down
and we were-- and all of a sudden, they started when they passed--
I can't see my finger in this.   Right around here, they pass

about 35 degrees north latitude and sunspots appear.
We don't know if that's a correlation, it happen twice,
you know, that's the way it is.
With correlations they-- they happen.
You don't know whether to believe it.
But that's when we knew Cycle 24 is gonna show
up with all these band coming down.
And regardless of what anybody else said, we could look at that and say.
Solar [inaudible]-- Solar Cycle 24 is here
and this seems a support of being weak as well.
Okay, that magnetic field thing.
The research instrument on SDO is actually studying the magnetic field
but the direction as well as that black or white.
Black and white just meant it was toward us or away from us.
This is-we actually wanna know the slant angle.
We wanna know how much of it is pointed this way, not just this way.
We wanna know how much is that way.
And so this is one of the early examples.
This is still a research project.
It hasn't been completed yet and know
at point they've drawn a little line
that represents the magnetic field direction and strength.
The length is the strength and the angle is the direction
and at this point they're cooling looking hedgehog diagrams.
They look like moles or something running around in your yard.
There is actually a lot of information in here.
In the next 10 years, we're going
to see this become what wave data was resolved.
We were not quite sure what we're gonna do with it
but we know we're gonna be out to do some great stuff with it.
Alright, and just to show you some other-- you know, I think--
oh man, I wish you could all crowd around here.
This is magnetic field.   You can see the white,

that's magnetic field pointing towards you bubbling up out
of the sun and this is how the sunspot forms for an active region.
It's just shows up, it boils up from inside.
It doesn't magically appear.
We can watch them show up and we have some early evidence
that we can see things happening before they show up.
So once again, that's a prediction, get about a day
to several days warning that an active region is about to appear.
That's another research project.
It's not done yet but we're hoping that over the next 5 years
or so we'll get the data to understand that better.
So we'll be out to do prediction.
Alright. You saw that over the course of 400 years,
we went from people looking at the sun through telescopes
and drawing things on paper
to some really exceptionally beautifully images of the sun
in wavelengths that Galileo could not have imagined.
And the challenge that I did, I think I gave this talk
or I gave an early version of this talk last week with kids
in the room, and the challenge
to them is what are you gonna look at the sun as.
I mean this is what-- this is what you're gonna grow
up looking at the sun like.
What are you going to be doing in the next solar?
What's Solar Cycle 25 going to be studied with?
Because we're doing a great job now but we've been doing a great job
in every solar cycle so far.
We've pushed the limit of technology in every solar cycle.
SOHO pushed the limit for space-based technology.
Before that, we had [inaudible], we've had satellites,
we've had ground base--
they've always pushed the limit because this is the sun,
this is where you can do it.   You got plenty of signal.

What are you gonna look at the sun like in Solar Cycle 25?
And with that, join us, it's your data.
I mean, you probably don't want at all.
It's about a petabyte year, a terabyte in half a day of download
which decompresses to somewhere around 2
to 3 terabytes a day in data.
You don't want it all but we try and make it available to you
so you can look at it and the data-- and I'm gonna go back to that page
in a minute for questions, come to our website,
that's the sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov.
We have some cool ways to look at all the different kinds of data.
We have a very-- I have enforcement to bringing on board SDO project,
what we call an Education and Public Outreach Team.
That's much younger than me.   That's not hard to do.

I was born at the dawn of space age.
They have grown up with computers and they think that twitting
and all these other social media is the way to be
and I indeed participate in Tweetups.
We're having on Saturday and we have a Facebook presence
and it's all an attempt to get people out there aware
of solar activity and how SDO data can be used, I mean played with,
people doing art contest with it.   So, you know, join the fun.

It's a great dataset.   And thank you very much.

[ Applause ]
>> Can we have about 10 minutes for questions?
I'm sure they have questions.   I'll start in the back and work up.

>> Yeah. Hi, I work in geography maps and a lot
of this is quite relevant.
However, I'm not an expert, so it's [inaudible] that, you know,
I'm asking the question the best way.
But could you talk to us more
about how you think your predictions will improve, whether it has to do
with the mapping and the algorithms and the-- just overall precision.
How do you think that's the next [inaudible]?
>> Okay, so I'm gonna repeat your question
and that's the one I'm gonna actually going to answer.
>> Okay.   >> Okay. How does the-- [laughter]

If it's not the right question you will have to iterate.
>> Okay.
>> So how does analyzing SDO data help us with our mapping algorithms?
And actually that's a critical point to us.
We don't have continence.
We don't have a fixed point on the sun at all.
We kinda have to work with this rotating body that rotates faster
at the equator and slower at the poles and not all the time.
So we have real problems with mapping
and even my graduate students will attempt to map features
on the sun were having issues because we're off by a couple
of pixels that caused them to be off instead of 1 percent,
it was 2 percent in the number they were trying to do.
So they were off a hundred percent because of the inability
to map the sun accurately.
So I think that we do worry about the projection in mapping
and putting coordinates on the sun all the time.
That's a major issue.
I don't know whether our flexible coordinate system can be adapted
to what you [inaudible] on the Earth.
But certainly, the people on SDO are aware
of geographic mapping conventions and what we do gets fed back
in to the-- with our several standards conventions that worry
about mapping conventions and the solar people have

over the last 10 years become one of those standards committees
at an attempt to get us a standard coordinate system on the sun.
It has not been completely successful.
We were off by degrees in both directions on a regular basis
but we're much better than we used to be.
So I think it will help a lot, but the iteration--
it's an iterative process that would take place
over the next couple of years.
>> As a layman [inaudible] movies and photographs.
Is there any consistency in the colors represented
like if I'm looking at it mean, you know, move your photographic sun.
Is that anything here?
Is there any consistency between SDO or [inaudible] the sun
in general or [inaudible]?
>> Okay, so the question is, do we lie to you the same all the time?
[Laughter] Okay, you would
like to know whether our colors are always the same colors.
And no, as a matter of fact, the people argue with us.
If you want to get people on a science conference to argue
with each other, just argue whether that's the right color.
[ Laughter ]   >> Okay, that was blue in SOHO.

>> Okay.
>> Okay. And we-- we actually in our helium line,
the one with the trebuchet prominence we've showed
and we like that orange.
And the people that actually produced the data make it a much
darker red you can barely see.
You saw that when I did the comparative slide.
That's one of the other colored tables.
So, there tends not to be a consistency
because people look at different things.
So, somebody that wants to look at something in the middle
of the sun will want a different color table than somebody who wants
to look around the edge of the sun.
Things are dimmer at the edge than they are in the middle
and so they'll do a different color table to emphasize that.
We do attempt to maintain consistency
but it's a scientific mission and the people
who take the data don't actually get it with a color table.
They get a black and white image and have to put a color table on it.
And at that point you've lost any consistency.
But we attempt with the data that comes from our website,
we are trying to keep it all the same color table
to avoid that confusion.
And we are attempting to get people to use the same color table
but then somebody-- as soon as everybody says, "Okay, we agree,"
then somebody else say, "Yes, but I like this one to be blue."
So, you lose at that point.
It's there's always going to be differences.
That's why it's important that you look in the lower left hand corner
and that tells you what the band is.   This is the 171 channel.

So we have 304, 171, 211, 193.   And by knowing what that channel is,

you know what data you're looking at.
>> Yes, so given that there is a correlation
between the solar activity and also the seismic activity,
although that doesn't prove the cause.
Given the current earthquake that occurred in Japan,
shouldn't there be a discussion around perhaps what is causing some
of these activities, perhaps it lies in say the cosmic ray flux
or something or other-- shouldn't this be something to look
into given some of this activity that is going on,
these natural disasters rather than sort of the current media hysteria
around the one nuclear plant.
>> Well, the-- okay, so I'm going to interpret that question
as is there a correlation between solar activity
and earthquakes here on Earth?   That correlation is much disputed.

There are people that say it's true.
There are other people that say it's not.
I am not an expert on--
>> I was saying, shouldn't we investigate--
>> I'm almost there, okay.   Feel free.

[Laughter] Okay.
I mean you think, you have a legitimate scientific question.
This is the United States, here's the data,
the earthquake data is available as freely as the solar activity data.
It's-- there's nothing wrong with attempting to study that.
This is a big subject, and especially in Eastern Europe,
in Greece, is whether or not there's a relationship
between solar activity and earthquake activity.
The work I have seen, it has been spotty
and the data tends to be cleaned a lot.
So, where you take, you know, where there is large-- so it's--
so let's say I don't have a causal response, okay.
Well, let's just say if there is an X3 flare,
we tend to have a magnitude 7 earthquake within 2 days.
Okay, what they do and I've seen-- I've watched the papers,
they just take out the times it doesn't work.
And so it becomes a very poor prediction at that time
because you have a lot of flares where there isn't an earthquake
and they just don't include that data because, well,
I didn't have an earthquake to put it in.
So, it's one of the areas where correlation is a difficult--
correlation versus causation becomes a problem
and having actually studied earthquake prediction that's--
solar activity is not the most important thing
in earthquake prediction.   But once again, feel free.

The data is available and you can suggest
that to other people as well.
But there's a lot of interest in whether or not that is true.
>> I was trying to look at some of [inaudible].
>> May I ask 3 quick easy questions about SDO.
>> Three.   >> Three?

>> They're easy.
>> There are other people in the room.
>> Try one.   >> Try one?

>> Yeah, go ahead.
>> Are the sensors gonna have to be baked of like they do on SOHO?
>> Okay, so you ask whether the sensors have to be baked out.
The goal was to not bake them out, however,
there appears to be contamination and so we will be baking them
out probably not as much as on SOHO.
We were a little bit-- evidently a little bit better
at contamination control but there appears
to be water inside the telescopes and the only--
that forms ice on the detectors.
They are held at minus 100 Celsius that forms ice
and over time you have to just warm them up and push the ice off.
We-- it looks like we'll have to do it every 6 months or so but not
as for long as they did on SOHO.   >> Okay.

>> How about some, so why don't we come back.
>> When you see something [inaudible] from the sun,
how long does it take before it actually impacts the Earth?
>> How long does it take light to get from the sun to the Earth?
>> Well, I know that--   >> 8-- I'll get there.

>> Okay, fine.   >> Like a flare is a flash of light.

That's all a flare is.
It's a big flash of light, 8 minutes within 20 percent.
It takes the material that comes off the sun is actual particles,
mostly hydrogens and helium and a bunch of everything else,
and that travels around a million miles an hour.
How far is the Earth from the sun?   93 million miles.

It takes 93 hours on average to get here.
That's about 4 days.   Yeah, 4 days.

The stuff that comes off can be faster.
It can be here as rapidly as about an hour.
This means it's really moving fast when it leaves the sun,
a lot faster than a million miles an hour, and it can also take slower
because of the path it has to take is not necessarily straight.
It can be quite curved and so it can take considerably longer.
The ones that are dangerous are the ones that get here fast.
We've seen times there was at--
an episode in 2006 where the particles got here
about 90 minutes after the flare.
So, that's the trigger, you see a flare that's 8 minutes.
The event happened 8 minutes ago
and now you wanna know how fast the particles are gonna be here.
If they're there within hours,
you know that was a fast very energetic particle event.
And that one wiped out GPS over the United States for 8 hours.
It was a good event.   >> Yeah.

[ Laughter ]   >> I use paper maps.

[ Inaudible Remark ]   >> Supermoons.

I'm sorry, the earthquakes being caused


I don't know what the supermoon is but--
>> Oh, that's when the moon is really close to the Earth,
and last Saturday it's been really close to the [inaudible] since 1993
and there were a lot of people saying, well,
when Katrina happened it was within-- close to the supermoon,
close-- and now we had Japan and that was a supermoon [inaudible].
[ Laughter ]
>> I saw an excellent lecture on earthquake prediction by a man
who at the AGU meeting, we-- you know, we go to these meetings
and they had a half hour speak-- talk and the guy didn't show up.
And rather than get off time he said, "Okay, I'll tell you what,
I'll just get up and give you an extemporaneous talk
on earthquake prediction."
That's probably the best talk I've ever seen on earthquake prediction.
And there are attempts to do it.
These are-- these guys really work at it
and they have all the tidal stuff.   They really, they do.

And they're just as bad out of this as anybody else.
[Laughter] It's just-- it's very difficult to do
because to a first order, what you're looking
at is somebody slipping on the floor.
Okay. There are-- two things are pushing like this
and eventually they go like that.
And you're trying to predict when that happens.
It maybe go like this in California.
I believe it's a subduction zone near Japan.
So, the thing went like that, it went down to the Earth.
You're just trying to predict when that slip is going to occur
and they really work at it.
They get paid-- then we get paid a lot of money if they could do it
but I'm sure that the tidal forces from the moon may be a part of that
and I would believe that more than I would solar activity.
>> So we have a couple more and we'll come back to you [inaudible].
Oh, good ahead, sir.   >> Oh, that's okay.

[ Inaudible Remark ]   [ Laughter ]

>> Okay, the best actor is Raj.   >> Right.

>> Because he is the one that always has to react
in a way that's consistent with whatever anybody else just did.
So, I think he's the best actor.
Sheldon is just like-- I can't use the language here.
One of the professors that I did not have to take a class with but was
at the University of Florida when I was a graduate student, back--
that Sheldon, you could replace that guy with Sheldon
and know what it was like to interact with him.
[ Inaudible Remark ]   [ Laughter ]

>> You know, Leonard of course 'cause he's the only one
that has glasses like they should.   So, he's my-- Leonard is my favorite

but that's only because he has glasses.
Also he got to date a beautiful woman and you know that was like a--
>> And-- that wasn't realistic.
>> Yeah. But that was just a dream of mine
when I was at graduate school.   >> Yeah, he's dating Raj's sister.

>> Yeah, but that's just 'cause the show has actually lasted more
than 2 seasons.   [ Inaudible Remark ]

>> What sort of orbit is SDO in and is the sensors gonna white
out when the flare gets them like SOHO did?
>> Okay, so what orbit is SDO in and what will happen
to the sensors during a particle storm.
>> Yes.
>> Okay, it's in an inclined geosynchronous orbit,
so that means it has a 1-day period.
It appears to stay at roughly the same longitude but it's inclined
so it actually tracks out a figure 8 over the ground station.
So with the ground station it's in, it doesn't just point.
That's the kind of point in--   [ Inaudible Remark ]

>> Okay. Yeah, it has an [inaudible] shape that it has to trace out.
We did that 'cause we're cheap.
Okay, the geostationary orbits are expensive.
You have to pay for them.
And so rather than take one, we just go through it twice a day.
So we essentially occupy it and didn't have to pay.
The sensors will white out.
You don't see that because that's been removed.
We take out the particle hits.
Before the data shows up the particle hits are removed.
They probably won't be as bad as SOHO because the instruments
in this case-- the one on SOHO is actually open,
so the particles can stream right down to the CCD.
All our instruments have some kind of metal
between the solar particles and the CCD.
It's hitting the CCD that's bad.
And so we've surrounded them with metal learning
from SOHO trying to minimize those hits.
But if a big storm comes, we'll see the same kind of pattern.
And then we have built a very expensive particle detector.
>> Thank you everyone.
And there's a-- some NASA slide out [inaudible].
[ Applause ]   [ Inaudible Discussions ]

[ Laughter ]
>> So we have to pay somebody for orbits in certain areas.
>> You have to rent them.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.