Starship Asterisk*

sunspot2: Credit: SOHO - EIT Consortium, ESA, NASA

Explanation: Season's greetings! At 01:48 Universal Time on June 21 the Sun reaches its northernmost point in planet Earth's sky marking a season change and the first solstice of the year 2000. In celebration, consider this delightfully detailed, brightly colored image of the active Sun. From the EIT instrument onboard the space-based SOHO observatory, the tantalizing picture is a false-color composite of three images all made in extreme ultraviolet light. Each individual image highlights a different temperature regime in the upper solar atmosphere and was assigned a specific color; red at 2 million, green at 1.5 million, and blue at 1 million degrees C. The combined image shows bright active regions strewn across the solar disk, which would otherwise appear as dark groups of sunspots in visible light images, along with some magnificent plasma loops and an immense prominence at the righthand solar limb.

Photo Credit: Soho - Eit Consortium, Esa, Nasa Photo

RJN wrote:Have a look at the caption to the right of the beginning of this story on today's Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 04114.html .

It seems to quote an old APOD verbatim. Compare this to: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap000621.html . What's particluarly strange is that the WashPo article (taken from New Scientist apparently) is posted today, 2010, June 22, but the quoted APOD text was from the year 2000. Does anyone have any idea what they were thinking?

The Eclectic wrote:Things must have changed since the 22nd of June because now the text of the article at the WP is greatly expanded and neither the article nor the caption bears any resemblance to the APOD entry for June 21, 2000.

• 

• June, 2010
  
  From the EIT instrument onboard the space-based SOHO observatory, the tantalizing picture is a false-color composite of three images all made in extreme ultraviolet light. Each individual image highlights a different temperature regime in the upper solar atmosphere and was assigned a specific color; red at 2 million, green at 1.5 million, and blue at 1 million degrees C.
  
  NASA-SOHO - EIT Consortium, ESA, NASA

bystander wrote:

The Eclectic wrote:Things must have changed since the 22nd of June because now the text of the article at the WP is greatly expanded and neither the article nor the caption bears any resemblance to the APOD entry for June 21, 2000.

Au contraire. The main picture is still the same picture as APOD: 2000 June 21, and the caption in the photo gallery for that picture is still the third and fourth sentences from that APOD; however, they give the date as June 2010. And the article is still from New Scientist, of course they say that at the end of the article.

• 

• June, 2010
  
  From the EIT instrument onboard the space-based SOHO observatory, the tantalizing picture is a false-color composite of three images all made in extreme ultraviolet light. Each individual image highlights a different temperature regime in the upper solar atmosphere and was assigned a specific color; red at 2 million, green at 1.5 million, and blue at 1 million degrees C.
  
  NASA-SOHO - EIT Consortium, ESA, NASA

neufer wrote:So they are posting a (June 2000) sunspot maximum photo as
representative of the current (June 2010) sunspot minimum?