We’ve reached an amazing milestone thanks to you, our users. Users of Helioviewer.org and Jhelioviewer have created over one million movies since we started counting them in February 2011. This represents an incredible amount of interest from you – our users – in the Sun and the inner heliosphere. We’d like to thank you for your continued interest in exploring our star and its influence in interplanetary space.

The millionth movie was of one hour’s worth of data from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on SDO, focusing on this small but fast ejection from the Sun.

This led to a faint and extended coronal mass ejection seen in LASCO C2.

The coronal mass ejection was noticed in many different online catalogs of features and events in the Sun, but the original eruption was not. This is an example of how users are finding events on the Sun which are sometimes overlooked.

Just before the millionth movie, someone made this movie of one week of solar activity. This movie shows many different flares and eruptions of all sizes over the course of a week. Also, about 10 seconds into the movie (beginning around 2013-04-17 16:30 UT), you can see that black edges appear on all sides of the field of view. This is caused by the SDO spacecraft pointing slightly away from the center of the Sun for short periods of time. SDO does this to enable measurements of the AIA and HMI detectors. These measurements are a regular and normal part of running the AIA and HMI instruments, and allow us to keep track of the degradation of the detectors.

We’ll be adding new functionality and datasets to the Helioviwer Project in the next few months. We are committed to making it easy for everyone everywhere to explore the Sun and inner heliosphere, in the way you want. We hope that you continue to enjoy using Helioviewer.org and Jhelioviewer. If you have any ideas on how we can improve our service, please let us know.

Finally we’d like to thank the many NASA, ESA and JAXA funded organizations that have made the Helioviewer Project possible.

Thanks!