Solar Activity

Real Time Solar Activity

Sunspots and solar flares are the most important thing to aurora watchers. If we have lots of sunspots, then there are good chances of some serious solar flares (M and X class) and therefore very good chance for auroras.

Using this page you can monitor the suns activity, including sunspots, solar flares, coronal holes, CME’s etc. The images are the very latest images available and are provided by the worlds leading space weather labs. Some images update faster than others, so the term real time is not strictly true for some of them, but it’s as close to real time as we will likely ever get monitoring something 149 million kilometres away (92 million miles). If you are new to all this and your not quite sure what it all means, have a read of these pages and it should start to make sense: Solar Flare wiki and Sunspot wiki

Click the images to enlarge them.


Latest GOES Solar X-ray Image


Current Sunspots

193
193 ångström image
(Good for checking Coronal Holes)

Lasco C2 image aurora borealis
Latest Lasco C2 image
(Good for checking CME’s)


GOES 6 hour X-ray Flux (Monitors Solar Flares | 6 hour graph)
(Updated every minute)


GOES 3 day X-ray Flux (Monitors Solar Flares | 3 day graph)
(Updated every 5 minutes)

Real Time Solar Flare List

Any flares that show up on the real time images above, will show on this table within a few minutes (it takes a few minutes to determine which sunspot the solar flare originated from). The table displays the last 5 solar flares (the very latest flare will be at the bottom). Note, the flare has to have finished flaring to show up, if you see on the X ray images above that a flare is in progress, it won’t show up here until it’s done. This data is provided by Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory which is a department of the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center (ATC) in Palo Alto, California.

Event# Name Start Stop Peak GOES Class Sunspot No.
16 gev_20170822_1109 2017/08/22 11:09:00 11:16:00 11:13:00 C1.0 N08W33 ( 2671 )
17 gev_20170822_1430 2017/08/22 14:30:00 14:45:00 14:38:00 B6.7 N07E55 ( 2672 )
18 gev_20170822_1511 2017/08/22 15:11:00 15:25:00 15:17:00 B6.6 N11W23 ( 2671 )
19 gev_20170822_1605 2017/08/22 16:05:00 16:11:00 16:08:00 B5.6 N11W26 ( 2671 )
20 gev_20170822_1742 2017/08/22 17:42:00 17:53:00 17:50:00 C1.9 N09W37 ( 2671 )

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freeland@lmsal.com

Solar summary past 24 hours

  • 7th January 2016

    .24 hr Summary…
    Solar activity was low. The largest solar event of the period was a C1
    flare from Region 2480 (N02E65, Dao/beta). The region continued to
    develop as it rotated further onto the solar disk, exhibiting penumbral
    coverage around the trailer spot as well as developing new intermediate
    spots. Region 2477 (N11E89, Hax/alpha) displayed the onset of some
    separation in its singular spot. Several different areas of pours were
    noted and are being monitored for further development.

    Several eruptions were observed in SOHO/LASCO coronagraph imagery over
    the past 24 hours. The most prominent was an eruption from around the SW
    limb, near old Region 2473, creating a partial halo signature first seen
    in C2 imagery beginning at 06/1412 UTC. A filament eruption around the
    same time was observed lifting off the SE limb around 06/1200 UTC. Both
    events were analyzed and not expected to cause impacts to Earth.

    Another eruption in the corona was observed in SDO AIA193 imagery
    beginning around 06/1241 UTC near Region 2477. Activity from previous
    eruptions still being present in coronagraph imagery caused difficulty
    in analyzing an associated coronal mass ejection (CME) signature. The
    subsequent model run suggested a glancing blow is possible around 09
    Jan.

    .Forecast…
    Solar activity is expected to be very low with a chance for C-class
    flares over the next three days (07-09 Jan).

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