Happy Birthday SOHO! In honor of the 20th anniversary of the launch of ESA and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, NASA held a contest to vote on the best image captured by the mission during its two decades in space since Dec. 2, 1995.
The winner of the image contest, shown here, is a composite of two SOHO images from two different instruments. The background is an image taken on Jan. 8, 2002, by SOHO’s coronagraph, an instrument that blocks the bright face of the Sun, allowing us to see the much fainter solar atmosphere. This coronagraph image shows a widely spreading coronal mass ejection, or CME, as it blasts more than a billion tons of material out into space at millions of miles per hour. The Sun, seen at the center of the image, was captured by SOHO’s Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope on a different day. The second image was enlarged and superimposed over the occulting disk to create this composite view. The image of the Sun shows extreme ultraviolet light of 304 angstroms – which is normally invisible to our eyes but is here colorized in red.
Steele Hill and Sarah Frazier
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
