A study of cosmic ray flux based on the noise in raw CCD data from solar images

Abstract

AbstractRaw solar images from CCDs are often contaminated with single‐pixel noise which is thought to be made by cosmic ray hits. The cosmic ray‐affected pixels are usually outstanding when compared with the perimeter zone. In this work, we use a method based on the median filtering algorithm to identify and count the cosmic ray traces from SOHO/EIT solar images to estimate the cosmic ray (CR) flux. With such cosmic ray flux, we study the transient variations associated with the violent solar activities, such as the solar proton events (SPEs), which show good similarity with the observations of GOES 11 P6 channel with an energy interval 80–165 MeV. Further, using SPE list observed by SOHO/ERNE proton channels with more narrow energy intervals, it is found that CRs in the energy range 118–140 MeV affect the SOHO/EIT images the most. In addition, by using a robust automatic despiking method, we get the background of the cosmic ray flux from solar images, which is considered to be the galactic cosmic ray (GCR) flux. The GCR flux from solar images shows an 11 year period due to the solar modulation, similar to the SOHO/ERNE GCR flux and Newark neutron monitor count rates. Furthermore, GCRs from solar images have a 27 day period and show good anticorrelation with the changes of solar wind velocity.