Fading Solar Flares

Eruptions Decay

During my last solar observing session on May 22nd I was able to see two solar flares. Although I missed the initial development of each flare, I was able to make small time lapse animations of their decline. The flare in active area 3312 faded away over 20 minutes between 9:47 and 10:07 EDT as shown in the first animation below:

(The individual frames in these animations run from start to finish in an endless loop.) The flare seems to sink into the background.

The other flare, in sunspot 3311, disappeared in only 10 minutes from 10:14 to 10:24 EDT as you can see in the following 11-frame animation:

Each individual frame in these animations was obtained by stacking the 100 best frames from a 1,000-frame video. I recorded one video clip every 60 seconds.