Tagged: Sun

Blue sun bursting

Our Sun is not a giant blueberry. Our Sun can be made to appear similar to the diminutive fruit, however, by imaging it in a specific color of extreme violet light called CaK that is emitted by the very slight abundance of ionized Calcium in the Sun’s atmosphere, and then false color-inverting the image. This solar depiction is actually scientifically illuminating as a level of the Sun’s chromosphere appears quite prominent, showing a crackly textured surface, cool sunspots appearing distinctly bright, and surrounding hot active regions appearing distinctly dark.

Partial Solar Eclipse with Airplane

It was just eight minutes after sunrise, last week, and already there were four things in front of the Sun. The largest and most notable was Earth’s Moon, obscuring a big chunk of the Sun’s lower limb as it moved across the solar disk, as viewed from Fremantle, Australia. This was expected as the image was taken during a partial solar eclipse — an eclipse that left sunlight streaming around all sides of the Moon from some locations.

Hypnotic solar explosions in 4k

To the naked eye, our sun is an unremarkable ball of heat and light. Under the eye of the Solar Dynamics Observatory, or S.D.O, the Sun’s activity is revealed under various spectrums of light....

Sunset at Dog Rocks

The glorious twilight sky above was captured at Dog Rocks, Batesford, near Geelong, Australia on January 18, 2013. I happened to be the only one here this evening and was treated to these gold and red hues just after the Sun dipped below the horizon. Mid-level clouds were positioned just right to reflect the reddened sunlight. Without clouds or aerosols of some kind, sunsets and sunrises are generally lackluster. Notice also the set of faintcrepuscular rays just to the right of the silhouetted juniper in the foreground.

Three years of Sun in three minutes

In the three years since it first provided images of the sun in the spring of 2010, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has had virtually unbroken coverage of the sun’s rise toward solar maximum, the peak of solar activity in its regular 11-year cycle. This video shows those three years of the sun at a pace of two images per day.

A Year on the Sun

Our solar system’s miasma of incandescent plasma, the Sun may look a little scary here. The picture is a composite of 25 images recorded in extreme ultraviolet light by the orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory between April 16, 2012 and April 15, 2013. The particular wavelength of light, 171 angstroms, shows emission from highly ionized iron atoms in the solar corona at a characteristic temperatures of about 600,000 kelvins (about 1 million degrees F). Girdling both sides of the equator during approach to maximum in the 11-year solar cycle, the solar active regions are laced with bright loops and arcs along magnetic field lines. Of course, a more familiar visible light view would show the bright active regions as groups of dark sunspots.