Sungrazer Project
Sungrazer Project
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Latest News and Information!Fact-bites, stories, general information, and points of interest relating to near-sun comets, comet images, SOHO and STEREO data...Note: all external links open in new windows. October 4th, 2011 -- Sungrazer Project Status update... we're back! (Almost...)My last message here on May 2, 2011, was not a happy one, as once again funding for this tremendously popular and important project somehow once again became scarce. Nonetheless, another year of funding has now been secured and I soon plan to get everything back up-to-date once again. This will take time, however, but I will try to get the flow of information going again.The SOHO Comet Count now stands at 2,143 with the most recent being a rather spectacular Kreutz-group comet seen in LASCO C3 and C2, and both STEREO spacecraft. Shortly after this comet's demise, a large CME blasted out from the Sun, leading to the usual speculation about comets causing CMEs. In honor of this event, and the few others like it that have similarly proven completely unrelated, I have created a permanent page discussing comets and CMEs. I'm sure I'll be pointing to this a lot in the future... So stay tuned to the site over the coming weeks as things slowly start to get back to normal...  May 2nd, 2011 -- Sungrazer Project StatusBelow is a copy of a message that I just posted to the "Yahoo! SOHOHunter" group page regarding the funding status of the Sungrazer project."Once again I'm sad to report that the Sungrazer project is currently unfunded. Much of the problem this year has been due to the great uncertainty in (or complete lack of...) the budget for the US government. That particular issue has now finally been resolved but it is going to take a while before it can be determined if/how that might trickle down to my level. Again I have tried the peer-reviewed proposal process but the Sungrazer project is a tricky one for a number of reasons that I won't go into right now. I will continue to pursue this avenue but that's a very slow process. So, what does it mean for the Sungrazer work and comet hunting? Well of course the website will remain active, and you should all continue to hunt for comets. I will not be able to perform the astrometric measurements for the comets, or employ a student to do that. If a particularly noteworthy object comes along then I will volunteer my time to make sure it gets the necessary attention. I will seek assistance from one or two of you to help me keep on top of newly reported comets, and again I will try to volunteer some of my time to keep you informed of the newest comet discoveries. I will try and keep an eye on the web site in general, just to make sure things are running OK. However, I might only check it every week or so, so please do not hesitate to email me if there's something that you think I need to be aware of, or take care of. Tweeting is quick-and-easy for me, so I will continue to do that (again, on my own time) for the almost-500 folks that now follow @SungrazerComets (http://twitter.com/sungrazerComets) The ultimate aim here is to do the absolute bare minimum possible so that it is not a huge headache to get the project running again if/when money is found once more. This procedure worked pretty well last time -- and funding did eventually turn up -- so I do have hope that it will happen again. The Sungrazer project has to count as one of the most successful NASA-data-based "Citizen Science" projects ever launched, and I think that there is an appreciation of that fact that will hopefully translate into funding once again. Many thanks for your understanding and continued support of the Sungrazer project during both the good and bad times. It is tremendously appreciated. I will, of course, keep you all updated." December 28, 2010 -- SOHO's 2000th comet!I am honored and absolutely thrilled to be able to announce that the ESA/NASA SOHO satellite has discovered its 2,000th comet!This incredible milestone was reached late in the day on December 26th, when amateur astronomer Michal Kusiak from Poland (who recently found his 100th SOHO comet) reported a possible small Kreutz-group comet in the SOHO/LASCO C2 images. This comet was hot on the heels of another one he had discovered earlier in the day, and together they became SOHO's 1,999th and 2,000th discoveries!
But regardless of what it looks like, this comet represents an extraordinary achievement. SOHO was not designed to look for comets -- it is purely a solar observatory. But, albeit unintentionally, SOHO has discovered well over half of all known comets in its 15-years of operation. And even more remarkable to me is that the overwhelming majority of these discoveries have been made by volunteer amateur "armchair" astronomers from all over the world, dedicating their free time to look for them. Because, in all honesty, there is no way that a fraction of these comets would have been recognized if not for this community effort. The combined man-hours would just be extraordinarily and unfeasibly expensive. So this is a remarkable project -- one that I'm truly honored to be running -- and one that I'm sure has at least a few hundred more comets left in it! So moving on to a slightly different note here, I really did not think that I would be making the SOHO-2000 announcement in 2010. It was only back on August 11th, 2010, that we were celebrating our 1,900th comet discovery. Based on typical comet discovery rates, this gave a projected date of February or even March, 2011. But the SOHO comets had other ideas, and something very unique happened... A comet storm!September and November were reasonably busy for comet discoveries, and I felt that the 2000th might push into January. Then December came, and the recent cold weather that has plagued much of the United States and western Europe apparently brought with it an ice-storm at the Sun, too! Between December 3rd and 9th, SOHO discovered ten Kreutz group comets! And then it got really busy... In an unprecedented ten-day period, SOHO observed an icy storm in space that resulted in another twenty-five comet discoveries! This is a record for SOHO... by a looooong way. I can recall once or twice seeing eight or ten comets in a period of a few days but such a sustained 'comet storm' as this one is quite incredible.A deeper meaning here?So is there a deeper meaning to all these SOHO comets? Obviously it's not related to Earth weather! But why would this happen? Well there are a couple of possibilities. The first is the most fun, and says that all these small comets are a precursor to a much larger object. It has been over 40yrs since we saw a "Great" Kreutz-group comet, so perhaps we're due one. That would be fabulous! However, I have to present possibility number two, which while far less fun, is also far more likely.So the second possibility is that this is just a statistical anomaly. SOHO averages one comet discovery about every three days, although this average has trended upwards somewhat in the past few years. But back in August and September of 2006, SOHO went 38-days without a comet discovery -- the longest dry spell on record, discounting times when the instrument(s) were not observing. While that 38-day dry spell does not fully cancel out our 25-comets-in-10-days, it is nonetheless an almost equivalent anomaly. And that really is most likely what we've seen -- an unusually dense cluster of small comets that have no greater significance than their statistical value. I hope I'm wrong though! August 27, 2010 -- The return of comet 2P/EnckeFlashback to 2007: The world watches in awe as comet Encke streaks through the STEREO/SECCHI HI1-A images. We gasp as a coronal mass ejection (CME) erupts out towards the comet. We hold our breath in shock as the CME blasts over the comet, brutally ripping away its tail. Finally, we sigh with relief as the tail grows back, as long and strong as ever before! The emotional roller-coaster can be relived right here as an animated gif or here as a processed (enhanced) huge 134Mb .mov file (right-click and save that last one -- don't try and view it in your browser...).But that was three-and-a-half years ago. We've all moved on, as did Encke. But now it's back... back in the STEREO/SECCHI HI-1A images, facing the Sun's fury again, and now the Sun is even more active than it was in 2007! What can we expect to see this time? Keep reading and you'll find out... OK, so perhaps I have over-dramatized things a little. But it was a very cool event back in 2007 and we have been waiting impatiently for Encke to come back (which we knew it would on its 3.3-year lap through the solar system). So it was exciting news when veteran STEREO comet-spotter Alan Watson (Australia) reported that it was visible in the SECCHI HI-1A images from August 23rd. Here's an image of it:  (click to enlarge) It the little thing on the right, between the two white markers I drew on there. Yeah, it's not much to look at, is it? It does look a little better if you view it in action: The images in that movie have been processed in such a way that it enhances the solar outflow (the material flowing out from the right), and reduces the brightness of the background stars. As a result, Encke shows up quite nicely, and you can even see some tail movement. Right now we only have data for Aug 23 and 24. In a few days time I'll update the movies to add in the new images we get -- hopefully by which time something dramatic will have happened! So you can tell from these images that Encke in 2010 is not as bright, and not as impressive, as Encke in 2007. Why is this? Did it lose too much material when the CME hit it? Is it running out of volatile elements to give off the dust and gas? No, of course not! (At least, it's extremely unlikely.) No, the problem is here quite fortuitously related to the last article I wrote on here (see below -- "Peaceful summer days"), and is a consequence of what we call the "viewing geometry". The STEREO spacecraft is in a completely different location in its orbit than it was 3.3 years ago. So even though Encke is following the same path, we are seeing it from a very different view-point. The geometry in 2007 was very good -- the comet was somewhat between the spacecraft and the Sun, and we got to watch it from a nice side-on angle with the tail pointing out to the left. In 2010 however, Encke is sweeping around from "behind' the Sun, and so it's tail is pointed (approximately, again) away from the spacecraft and so it looks much shorter*. We are also not getting any "forward scattering" (again, see my other article) of light, and so Encke just looks smaller and fainter. Unfortunately, this situation is not really going to improve much for the duration of it's pass through the HI-1 camera. So we will perhaps have to wait until 2013/2014 to see if we can get another show like we did in 2007. (And by then, the Sun will be at the maximum of the solar cycle... which means lots of CMEs flying in all directions!) But the Sun is waking up now, and we could still see a CME slam into Encke again -- we just wouldn't get quite as good a view as we did last time. It's still well-worth keeping an eye on though, and I'll certainly post any exciting movies as soon as we have them. --- * Need convincing of this? Pick up a pen/pencil and point it away from you. Close one eye and then slowly tilt the pen/pencil down slighty. The pencil will appear to get longer as you tilt it into your "plane" of vision. (You have to think two-dimensionally here, hence closing one eye helps.) The comet tail appears to get longer as it comes into the spacecraft's "plane of sky". July 14, 2010 -- Peaceful summer days...If you glance at the list of SOHO comet discoveries, you might notice that certain times of year have a lot more comet discoveries than others. Why is that, you ask? Here's how it works...Most of SOHO's discoveries -- about 85% -- come from the Kreutz group of comets. If we look at the number of Kreutz comet discoveries each month during the history of the SOHO mission, it is obvious that we get a lot more comet discoveries at certain times of the the year than others*:  It's pretty clear that (approximately) May and June, and October through December are very busy times of year, while January-March and July/August are noticeably quieter for discovering Kreutz-group comets. This was illustrated just recently when we had twenty comet discoveries in seventeen days in early June, and then since June 23 until now, we have only had three! (As an interesting aside, there is a slight peak in the number of non-Kreutz comet SOHO discoveries at these times too. A possible reason is that the comet hunters are paying more attention to the LASCO C2 images at these periods, so happen to notice more of the less-predictable non-Kreutz comets.) So why is this?The reason we see this 'seasonality' of Kreutz comet discoveries is due primarily to the geometry of the comet orbits. Let me explain that in more detail...The Kreutz group is a stream of (mostly very small) comets all following the same path (or orbit) through space. A good analogy would be cars on a race track, where the cars are the comets and the race track is their orbit (and it takes each car about 900 years do do one lap!). The Kreutz orbit is fixed in location in the solar system and does not move (appreciably, at least... Jupiter, for example, does actually tweak it somewhat, but on fairly slow timescales). But our location in the solar system -- and hence SOHO's location, since it stays between the Sun and the Earth at all times -- does move: we constantly travel around the Sun, completing one orbit every ~365 days. This means that at different time of the year, the Kreutz orbit is going to look like it is in a different location as we view it from different places in the solar system. Going back to the race car analogy, we can walk around the race track and the cars will look like they are going in a different direction depending on which side of the track we are -- but the track has not changed: just our view of it has. Therefore, at different times of year SOHO has a "better" view of the Kreutz orbit than at other times of year, leading to more SOHO Kreutz discoveries during these "better" times. But that's still not the full explanation... Instrument sensitivityYou might also notice that during times of high comet discovery rates (e.g. May/June, October-December), the majority of the comets are only seen in the LASCO C2 camera. This is not a coincidence! LASCO C2 is more sensitive to Kreutz comets than LASCO C3 is. It has better resolution (~12 arc-seconds per pixel, compared to C3's ~56arc-seconds per pixel); it is more sensitive to fainter objects (limiting magnitude ~m9, whereas C3 is maybe ~m7.5 - m8); and its filter (Orange) corresponds to a wavelength of light that the Kreutz comets show up particularly well in (C3 has a 'clear' filter). Therefore, LASCO C2 allows us to see much smaller and fainter comets than C3 does, even though those comets must have passed through C3 to reach the C2 camera. Finally, as you can see from the tracks of the comets in C2, at certain times of the year, the comets do not appear in the C2 camera until they are much closer to the Sun, and thus only the larger brighter ones make it this close to the Sun while still remaining visible.Viewing angleThere is actually one more factor in play, which is the 'phase angle' of the comet. The phase angle can be thought of as the angular distance that we observe between the comet and the Sun. The apparent brightness of the comet depends on the phase angle at which we see it, and varies according to how much of the comet appears to be illuminated by the Sun from our view-point. So at certain angles the comet can appear brighter, or fainter, than it actually is. This is not usually a strong effect for the SOHO Kreutz comets and so I will not go into it any further here, but interested readers can find easily more information about phase angle effects on many excellent web sites.Those wishing for further reading on this subject might be interested in the following papers about light scattering in comets by Dr. J.Marcus:
* Many thanks to Dr. Matthew Knight for getting the data to me for the plot (so that I didn't have to count the discoveries myself!), and also for allowing the direct link to his paper. June 16, 2010 -- The Sungrazer Project is back!!It was a pleasure to recently announce that, for at least twelve more months, the Sungrazer project is back in action! So to kick things off, here is a summary of some of the excitement that has passed since last September... Click here to read on...Probably the most noteworthy objects over the past few months have been a series of very bright Kreutz-group comets that flew through our cameras during the early part of 2010. The first was discovered in STEREO/SECCHI HI1-A data in early January by Alan Watson, and became STEREO-23. It exhibited some beautiful tail dynamics in HI1-A, so I actually made an exception and wrote a short news item about it ("January 11, 2010 -- Very Bright Comet!"). Over the next few weeks a series of bright Kreutz-group comet graced our fields of view, most notably SOHO-1786 (Jiangao Ruan), SOHO-1787 (Masanori Uchina), and STEREO-34 (Alan Watson). One month later -- February 15, 2010 -- Masanori Uchina and Michal Kusiak reported two components of a small but interesting pair of non-group comets which became SOHO comets #1805 and #1806. Comets SOHO-1805, SOHO-1806, and STEREO-34 can be seen in the images below. Click the thumbnails for larger versions of the images.
We haven't seen any more spectacular objects since STEREO-37, with all subsequent being somewhat more typical of the comets we see -- namely, very small and quite faint. But the next big one could be just around the corner, so keep hunting! Thanks to one of our veteran comet hunters, Polish amateur astronomer Michal Kusiak, who generously helped keep track of comet discoveries during Sungrazer's inactive phase, we can announce that the SOHO comet count currently stands at an astounding 1,864! The STEREO comet count is at a healthy 37 comets, which is impressive given the competition it faces with SOHO, and (by my count) already makes it the eighth most prolific comet discoverer in history. So we now have both the milestones of SOHO-2000 and STEREO-50 now looming on the horizon... As a final note, I'll just make a couple of remarks about the status of the Sungrazer project. As stated at the start of this article, we now have funding for a year, and in the meantime hope to secure funding for the year following that. Due to the inactivity of the project from September 2009 to May 2010, there is (was) a substantial backlog of work to be performed such as verifying/measuring ~160 comets and website updates, including the discovery tables, image gallery, confirmation lists and astrometry. I'm pleased to say that with the help of a fast-learning and fast-working summer student, the backlog of unmeasured comets is clearing up quickly, but other parts of the website may take longer to get updated. But you can now keep up-to-date with the latest breaking news form the Sungrazer project by following SungrazerComets on Twitter! If any particular information is needed, or something seems to be wrong on the site, you are always welcome, and encouraged, to contact me (just try and use relevant subject lines... I get spam...). Read less... January 11, 2010 -- Very bright comet!This news feature on the Sungrazer site has been very quiet of late due to unfortunate circumstances. But we just have to put in a mention of a wonderful bright Kreutz comet that was found by Alan Watson in the STEREO HI-1A images. Read on to see the awesome movie...On January 1st, 2010, expert STEREO comet hunter Alan Watson spotted a new Kreutz object in the STEREO/SECCHI HI1-A data. The comet quickly brightened and was soon seen in delayed LASCO C3 and C2 images. Movies of the comet in LASCO can be found in several places, some with surprising popularity! Those movies are very nice, but the pick of the bunch is the fantastic sequence you can (hopefully) see below. (If you don't see a movie above, you can view/download it here as an .avi (10MB),.wmv (1.3MB), or .mov (<1MB).) This movie was created by the finder himself, Alan Watson, who processed the HI-1 images before cropping and rotating them to make the sequence. It shows the comet in the SECCHI HI-1A images dramatically increasing in brightness as it nears the Sun. At the same time, it grows a beautiful long tail that starts to suffer the consequences of being buffeted by solar outflow. Hmmm... does this remind you of anything?! (Bit of trivia: it was also Alan that first alerted us to the comet Encke "disconnection event".) So very many congratulations to Alan for finding this fantastic comet. Read less... May 15,2009 -- Mysterious comets and igniting planets? No, they're mostly just ghosts...Regular viewers of SOHO and STEREO data are well familiar with the variety of strange artifacts we see in the satellites images sometimes. We see various strange blobs, reflections and streaks, and I frequently get emails about them (which is something I strongly encourage: you learn by asking questions, so ask away!). Of course, all of these things we see in the data are completely explainable when armed with the appropriate knowledge of CCD detectors (like in digital cameras) and instrument optics (telescopes, lenses, etc). So after over 13 years of SOHO/LASCO images, we have seen and explained every weird artefact that has appeared in the data, and occasionally responded to a few popular myths. More recently (October 2006), we launched the STEREO/SECCHI mission and began send back data from that too. As expected, the STEREO/SECCHI 'COR2' telescopes see exactly the same blobs and streaks (dust, cosmic rays, etc) that we see in LASCO. So no explanation needed there. But the Heliospheric Imagers (HI) are a new kind of telescope and with that comes a new set of strange image effects. So what I'm going to do here is address the two most commonly questioned artifacts that we see in the HI images and explain what they are and why we see them. Read on for the full explanation...Did that planet just explode?
Where did that bright comet come from?
At first glance, you would say that the image opposite shows a comet. It certainly looks like one. Check out the
movies here (~5Mb .mov) or here (~3Mb mpeg4).
Once again, the other bright dot is Mercury.There's a crucial clue that proves it isn't a comet: in this image, the Sun is on the left. A comet's tail always points away from the Sun, because it is formed by the solar wind flowing out from the Sun, so clearly this can not be a comet. So what's happening here? Well, it's essentially the same thing as described above, namely that a very bright object is at a certain point outside of the field of view of the camera, and is shining brightly on just the correct spot on the instrument such that its light is reflected in the detector and lens barrel cavities, creating the artefact you see. In this particular example, this artefact was seen immediately after Venus left the images, so it's pretty obvious that the two are related. But the same thing can happen if a bright object is about to enter the images, giving the appearance of an abruptly appearing and disappearing bright "comet". Slightly more technical explanationSo why did Venus appear to explode? What of the apparent ejection from Venus? As I mentioned, they are a result what we call "stray light" and "ghosting", and are basically due to a very bright object just creeping out of direct view of our cameras and the light from that object reflecting off of various parts of the instrument.
To explain it better, it's helpful to look at the design of the HI instrument. The Heliospheric Imager instrument has a series of lenses designed to
give us the optimum performance and sensitivity while minimizing the effect of extremely bright objects in the field of view. Remember: we're trying
to detect the incredibly faint signal of solar outflow and corona (atmosphere), so the telescope has to be really, really sensitive to faint signals.
In addition, this camera uses a very long exposure times -- 40-minutes per image, in fact! Planets like Venus are incredibly bright, especially when
you're up in space with no atmosphere to diffuse their light, and so when they shine into our camera, there is only so much we can do to stop 'bad' reflections.
As you can probably image, before launching a mission like STEREO it is vital that we design our instruments so that the stray light does not blind us. To help do this, we do 'ray tracing' simulations on computer models of our telescopes to simulate how beams of light will react as they enter the instrument. If you click on the image to the right, it will show an expanded diagram that I put together (which is why it's not very good...) that illustrates how a bright object is causing the 'ghosts' I have described above. At the top of the image is a 'ray tracing simulation' that shows bright light from some object being focused onto a point away from the CCD detector. This bright light then reflects back into the lens system and ultimately reaches the CCD as a very faint signal. The example given in the image is more specifically for the ring that emanated from Venus (the "VME"!). In the case of the 'mysterious comet', the explanation is partly as above but is more related to diffraction, which in this instance is the 'bending' of light waves around the edge of the telescope and instrument. Refraction is very common in optical systems but the effect is amplified in the HI instrument because of the very sensitive optics and the fact that our exposure times are so long. Any faint refraction (or reflection) that reaches the camera is going to accumulate in brightness for the entire duration of the exposure (~40-mins). So it's is actually an incredible feat of design and engineering that our telescopes have so very few artifacts in them! So as cool as it may seem for comets to suddenly appear, and planets to suddenly ignite, the true explanation is a little less exciting but hopefully, at least, a little interesting... (Many thanks to Jean-Philippe Halain (Centre Spacial de Liege, Belgium) for the ray-tracing diagram and technical assistance with this article!) Read less... April 9,2009 -- STEREO-20: Coming soon to a night sky near you!*
STEREO's 20th comet has been discovered... and it's a pretty exciting one! Comet C/2009 G1 (STEREO), also known as STEREO-20, was announced earlier today
on MPEC 2009-G30. Discovered yesterday by Chinese amateur astronomer Jiangao
Ruan, it is a small but relatively bright (~mag 10-11) comet that, unlike most of SOHO and STEREO's comet discoveries, does not belong to any known population
or group of objects. This in itself makes it an interesting target, but the most exciting part of this discovery is that it is very likely to be visible from Earth to observers with
relatively small telescopes! This may not seem like a particularly big deal, but of the more than 1,600 comets discovered by SOHO, only a very small number have
ever been seen from the ground (perhaps most notably C/1998 J1 (SOHO)), and none of STEREO's
other nineteen discoveries have been ground-observable at all.
Read more about this exciting discovery... |
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The image opposite shows C/2009 G1 (STEREO) in SECCHI HI1-B on April 6th, 2009 at ~23UT. The image has been processed in such a way as to enhance moving
features (such as comets and solar outflow), and minimize the effect of stars. It has also been cropped and then enlarged. Click for a larger version. Also available are the following movies: (We recommend you right-click the movies and save to your computer.) I will update these movies as more data becomes available. |
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This image (click for full version) shows C/2009 G1 (STEREO) as seen from Earth! It was taken remotely on April 10th by Belgian amateur astronomer
Erik Bryssinck using a telescope at the Moorook Observatory in Australia (part of the
Remote Astronomical Society's Global Rent-a-Scope program).
The image shows the comet looking much the same as it does in the SECCHI data -- namely, small and diffuse with no apparent tail. |
STEREO-# Reported Discoverer Cam(s) Group Images of... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ STEREO-008 Jan07,09 04:23 A.Watson HI1-A Kreutz Jan04,09 STEREO-009 Jan07,09 05:12 A.Watson HI1-A Kreutz Jan02,09 STEREO-010 Jan07,09 04:23 A.Watson HI1-A Kreutz Dec31,08-Jan01,09 STEREO-011 Jan13,09 04:42 A.Watson HI1-A,B NonGrp Jan10-12 STEREO-012 Jan22,09 19:31 R.Matson HI1-A Kreutz Jan19-20,09 STEREO-013 Jan31,09 20:42 R.Matson HI1-A Kreutz Jan29,09 STEREO-014 Feb12,09 18:40 R.Kracht HI1-A Kreutz Feb10,09 STEREO-015 Feb13,09 21:40 K.Battams HI1-A Kreutz Feb11-12,09 STEREO-016 Mar12,09 13:24 K.Battams HI1-A Kreutz Dec31,08-Jan01,09 STEREO-017 Mar11,08 05:33 A.Watson HI1-A Kreutz Mar07-08,08 STEREO-018 Jan12,09 22:13 R.Matson HI1-A Kreutz Jan10,09 STEREO-019 Jan13,09 05:17 A.Watson HI1-A Kreutz Jan10,09
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So do you think of yourself as an expert comet hunter? Or still learning how it all works? Either way, here is a nice little
test for your comet hunting skills! Between December 31,2008 and January 02, 2009 there were SEVEN Kreutz-group comets visible in the SECCHI HI-1A images. Download
and play the movie below (not the "spoiler"!) and see if you can spot all seven of them. Some are brighter than others, and the seventh is the trickiest to spot.
Maybe there's one in there that we haven't noticed yet!
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A few hours before this image was taken, Venus was typical looking
planet in the HI-1 field of view: it was bright, as expected, and had the vertical saturation spikes like those you see in Mercury in the image
(the other bright spot). But then just as it reached the edge of the images, it got huge! And prior to that, it seemed to throw a mass ejection
(a "VME" perhaps??) of its own out at the Sun. What happened?
