(The animation below requires the Adobe Flash Player.)

Images from the SOT's BFI and NFI instruments of Active Region 930 on December 13, 2006.  The golden picture shows sunspot structure and solar granulation pattern on the photosphere.  The red-toned image reveals hotter gases in the chromosphere.  The black-and-white map is a magnetogram, showing line-of-sight magnetic field polarities (white = north magnetic polarity, black = south magnetic polarity)

The animation above shows three of these views of the December 13, 2006 solar flare and associated sunspot #930, giving us a multi-aspect vision of this feature and event. Sunspot 930 is also shown in the SOHO image on the right. 

See also this Hinode animation of the flare event in action!

The golden-colored image was taken with Hinode's Broadband Filtering Imager (BFI)--which is, in the simplest terms, a camera with a filter, or Hinode's equivalent of taking a picture of the Sun through sunglasses.  That's a simplified analogy, but essentially the case.  The filter used to take this image, the "G-band" filter, samples light around a wavelength of 430.5 nanometers.  The picture shows in great detail the sunspot associated with this magnetically active region, as well as solar "granulation"--the freckled pattern of the photosphere formed by the tops of convection cells of solar gases "bubbling up" from inside the Sun.

The red-toned image was also taken by Hinode's BFI instrument, but with a different filter.  This filter samples a particular color (wavelength) of light from calcium (Ca II, at a wavelength of 396.85 nanometers).  Images taken with this filter reveal the heating of gases in the Sun's chromosphere, the layer of atmosphere just above the photosphere, which is why the solar flare--the bright, twisty, slinky-like magnetic structure--stands out so well in this picture. 

Sunspots and solar flares are all about magnetic fields; they are, in fact, cousin effects of the same root cause, a strong magnetically active region on the Sun's photosphere and in its atmosphere.  The black-and-white image is a map of solar magnetic field polarity called a magnetogram, which is derived from the SOT's Narrowband Filtering Imager (NFI).  The NFI can measure the polarization of light emitted by iron in the photosphere to determine the line of sight polarity of magnetic fields--that is, the polarity, north or south, of magnetic fields directed toward or away from us.  The white areas represent areas with north magnetic polarity, the black areas show south magnetic poles. 

Solar flares arise where strong and conflicting magnetic fields build up and get twisted.  Areas around and between strong magnetic poles of opposite polarity are good places to look when anticipating solar flares.

See also our report on Chabot's Solar Flare Monitor and its detection of this powerful X-class flare!

Chabot Space & Science Center is the Education/Public Outreach site
for the Lockheed-Martin Solar-B SOT/FPP Project