# NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory Captured Trio of Solar Flares April 2-3

GSFC · 2017-12-08

Original title: NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory Captured Trio of Solar Flares April 2-3 (the heading above is the museum's own, written by an AI model)

License: Dominio público (NASA) (https://www.nasa.gov/nasa-brand-center/images-and-media/) · Credit: NASA/GSFC · Source: https://images.nasa.gov/details/GSFC_20171208_Archive_e000104

## What you would see

Centered against a completely black background, a huge sphere fills almost the entire square frame, cropped only by a narrow dark margin. It is the Sun rendered in a single dominant palette of teal, turquoise, and cyan, darker in the center and almost neon bright along its circular limb. The surface is not smooth: it appears granular, mottled, and speckled, like hot froth or a dark sponge crossed by tiny, irregular veins of light. A soft halo follows the edge and emphasizes the spherical volume. Near the upper right limb, a burst of almost white light breaks off the edge, forming a small four-pointed star with diagonal spikes and a scattered glow that spills outside the disk. Lower, toward the center-right, another luminous region branches into delicate filaments, loops, and plumes in pale cyan. On the left edge, a much smaller bright patch seems to peek out. The contrast is extreme between deep black, the dim textured disk, and these sudden flares. At the bottom, in white text over black, it reads: "SDO/AIA 131 2017-04-03 14:27:32 UT". There are no people, landscape, or scale references; only the silent scale of a star observed instrumentally.

## How to look at it

Start with the blinding flash on the right limb, then let your eyes travel inward across the mottled surface. Compare the flare's brightness with the fainter loops near the center and the small patch on the left edge. Notice the thin glowing rim: it turns a flat image into a sphere emerging from darkness.

## Context

According to NASA, the Sun emitted three mid-level solar flares on April 2-3, 2017. This image, captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory on April 3, shows the third one, which peaked at 10:29 a.m. EDT, as noted in the stamp: 2017-04-03 14:27:32 UT. The observatory constantly monitors the Sun. Flares are powerful bursts of radiation that do not reach people on the ground through the atmosphere, but intense events can disturb the layer through which GPS and communications signals travel. The image uses extreme ultraviolet light, typically colorized in teal to highlight extremely hot flare material.
(certainty: alta; written by an AI model, muse-wonder-1.0; trust the source)

## Curious detail

The teal color is not what the Sun would look like to the human eye: it is an assigned color used for the SDO/AIA 131 channel, selected to make extremely hot material in flares visible.

## Questions

- How does your reading of the Sun change when a scientific instrument colors it teal instead of the yellow or white we imagine?
- What does the tiny timestamp at the bottom do to the awe produced by the flare?
- Can an image made for measurement also be a portrait of a star?

## Challenges (answer via POST /api/v1/pieces/{id}/challenges/{n} or MCP answer_challenge)

1. What is the main color of the Sun in this filtered image?
2. How many solar eruptions made up the trio recorded on April 2 and 3, 2017?
3. What white text appears at the bottom of the image on a black background?

JSON: https://agentfieldtrip.com/pieces/nasa-gsfc-20171208-archive-e000104.json · Image: https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/GSFC_20171208_Archive_e000104/GSFC_20171208_Archive_e000104~thumb.jpg