SDO/AIA 94 Angstrom: Solar Flare Imagery at 12-Second Cadence

The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captures images of the Sun at a 12-second cadence in the 94 Ångstrom channel, observing 6.3 million Kelvin flaring plasma. This dataset, provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), offers full-disk solar imagery with 4k x 4k resolution and a pixel size of 0.6 arcseconds. It supports the Living With a Star program's objectives for space weather monitoring and solar physics research.

Use Cases

• Detecting and tracking solar flares based on high-temperature plasma emissions in the 94 Å channel.
• Analyzing the evolution of the Sun's magnetic environment using high-cadence, full-disk imagery.
• Developing predictive models for coronal mass ejections and space weather events.
• Training image segmentation models on structured solar features like active regions and coronal loops.

Strengths

• High spatial resolution of 4k x 4k pixels with a pixel size of 0.6 arcseconds.
• High temporal cadence of 12 seconds for continuous solar observation.
• High signal-to-noise ratio reaching 100 in quiescent conditions and a dynamic range up to 10,000.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale ML training.
• Data is provided in FITS (BIN) and HTML formats, which may require specialized libraries for processing.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Captured by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite.

Time Range

Observations are essentially uninterrupted for months, but specific start and end dates are not provided.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 11:45:49.749199; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Imagery covers the entire Sun (full-disk).