NASA | IRIS: A Slice of Light

On June 27, 2013, NASA launched IRIS, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph. IRIS gives us our first detailed image of a layer of the sun’s atmosphere called the chromosphere. Boasting the highest temporal and spatial resolution to date, IRIS provides imagery and a special kind of data called spectra. In this video, we will look at IRIS data from a solar flare on March 11, 2015. An imaging spectrograph not only takes an image of the region of interest, but also has a small slit in the imager (seen as