Click on the image above for a larger .gif version.

Another non-flare cartoon, but not of course totally irrelevant. What do we see when we look at the edge (limb, in offical parlance) of the Sun? Everything is foreshortened, and our view tells us something direct about the height structure, but with tremendous confusion because of foreground/background overlap. Technically speaking, the Archivist is a bit unhappy with this cartoon. It is not in color - v. archaic - but if one is talking 3D, which is the theme here, what about fancier graphics?

In any case the purpose here is to help us understand "polar faculae" or mm-wave polar limb brightening. This is a subject related to global solar structure and the solar cycle, but of course the presence of magnetism at the limb leads to flare-like effects (jets, X-ray emission, hot loops). In this cartoon the open fields originating in the facula would be the site of the jet, a "pseudo-streamer" in the sense that the field is unipolar.

12 December 2010