File:X1.4 Flare of July 12, 2012 -Hinode XRT-.webm

On 12-July-2012, XRT observed an X1.4 flare from AR11520, which was also a target region of the High-resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C), a sounding rocket project successfully launched on the day before. Although periodic data gaps exist due to the Hinode spacecraft's night and SAA passages, XRT had fairly good data coverage for this event.

AR11520 had been a sigmoid before the eruption (left image taken at 15:31UT). After the X-flare event, new loops with orthogonal direction to the original S shape were formed and dominate the region (right image taken at 18:28UT). One more thing worth noting is that, at the maximum phase of the flare, we observed a thread-like brightening at the foot points of the loops later formed (16:25 - 16:32UT, see the movie images). They look like flare ribbons typically observed in the optical H-alpha line, but this is in soft X-rays.

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