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P2SC News

Automated SWAP Carrington Rotation Movies Online - Now with daily updates!

Mini Carrington Rotation ImageThe PROBA2 team is proud to present fully automated and daily updated Carrington rotation 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 description of active regions can be found here). A period of 27.28 days was chosen to represent a single rotation that largely resembles 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. Carrington determined a rotation rate of 25.38 days relative to background stars (sidereal rotation period). However, due to the Earths orbit, this is perceived as 27.28 days from the Earth. Each rotation of the Sun is assigned a Carrington Rotation Number, starting from 09-Nov-1853. That number has now reached 2194 at time of writing (13-Jun-2017); More information can be found here.

The first solar eclipse of 2017

On February 26th, lucky observers along the eclipse path in Chile, Argentina, Angola, Zambia and The Democratic Republic of the Congo have been able to witness an annular eclipse.

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