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Carrington Movies

A Carrington Rotation is a period of time chosen to represent one rotation of the Sun, allowing the comparison of features such as sunspot groups or active regions. A period of 27.28 days was chosen to represent a single rotation, corresponding to the recurrence time of features near the equator. The rotation period was initially conceived by Richard Carrington, when he determined the rotation rate of low latitude sunspots. Each rotation of the Sun is assigned a Carrington Rotation Number, starting from 09-Nov-1853.
 
The SWAP EUV imager onboard PROBA2 has been continually monitoring the Sun since early Feb-2010 (Carrington rotation 2093), and has observed more than 100 rotations already. Each of these rotations have been turned into a movie. Through these observations SWAP has monitored the Suns ever changing face and tracked its evolving features. The most intriguing aspect of the SWAP Carrington rotation movies is the ability to see the changing large-scale EUV structures located off the solar limb, out to the edge of SWAPs field of view (Figure 1). These structures trace out magnetic field lines, which can be seen due to hot plasmas trapped on them. In a standard SWAP image the signal-to-noise ratio in these regions is too small to distinguish individual structures. However, the SWAP team developed an image processing method that employs image stacking and median filtering techniques to improve the signal-to-noise and enhance the signatures of structures in these regions. Observations of the evolution of this region of the solar corona would be impossible without SWAP's unique large field of view. 
 
Carrington Rotation 2095Carrington Rotation 2155Carrington Rotation 2170
Figure 1. Comparing the sun throughout Solar Cycle 24. The left panel shows the sun on 26-Mar-2010 (CR2095 Movie) at the start of the rise phase of the solar cycle; the middle panel shows the sun on 18-Sep-2014 (CR2155 Movie) at the peak of activity; and the right panel shows the sun on 31-Oct-2015 (CR2170 Movie) in the declining phase of the solar cycle.
 
The current Carrington rotation movie is generated/updated each day with the latest images from the past day, and can be found here. Throughout the period of the Carrington rotation the length of the movie will increase, and at the end of the rotation the movie is archived here. At the beginning of a solar rotation don't be surprised if the movie is extremely short. 
 
Each movie has a cadence of roughly 100 minutes, and each image is comprised of a median stacked set of smoothed SWAP images over that period. It should be noted that special campaigns performed with the PROBA2 mission and/or SWAP imager onboard may result in some images being generated that are not suitable for the median stacking technique used to generate our Carrington rotation movies, and therefore on such (rare) occasions some movies may have a lower cadence than expected. Special campaigns performed with the PROBA2 mission can be searched for here.  
 
Finally, so researchers can use the data for searching for interesting events, or creating their own movies, the FITs (raw image) files can be found here. If higher cadence images are required feel free to contact the PROBA2 team at swap_lyra [@] oma.be. The code used to produce these Carrington movies is also available to all users throughout the SWAP IDL distribution (p2sw_long_movie.pro).