Every year, the STCE publishes a news item with an overview of the most memorable solar and space weather highlights. These include spectacular solar flares, impressive filament eruptions, huge coronal holes, and much more. Each time, a movie is compiled with several clips of each event. As it also makes reference to the associated effects such as strong geomagnetic storms, aurora sightings, extremes in solar wind parameters, and number of strong flares, the news item provides at the same time a brief status of the ongoing solar cycle.
The first such overview was written for 2012, and since then, 3 more have followed. As the current solar cycle 24 had its minimum in December 2008, an effort was made to catch up with activity from 2008 till 2011. Hence, for each of these 4 years, an article and associated movie have been created providing an overview of the most interesting events. All 8 overviews have now been put together on a dedicated page at the STCE website.
The 4 new movies (2008-2011) have been created with the 2016 version of the fabulous JHelioviewer software. The versatility and incredible, new features of this imaging and data display tool make these movies clearly superior in quality than those from 2012 and 2013. Aside the solar cycle evolution, the 8 years also show the rise and importance of solar imaging satellites such as SDO, STEREO and PROBA2, as well as the critical key observations that are performed by satellites such as SOHO and ACE.
We wish you an enjoyable time watching the movies and reading the summaries!
