Captured on January 28, 2020, this is the first image of a sunspot by the National Science Foundation’s Inouye Solar Telescope located near the summit of Haleakalā in Maui, Hawaiʻi. The image reveals striking details of the sunspot’s structure as seen at the Sun’s surface, and has over twice the detail previously achieved by any…
Tag: photosphere
Hinode Watches the Sun Weave Its Magnetic Web
Many of the features seen on the Sun might look like tongues of flame or fiery eruptions, but there’s no fire or lava on the Sun – its energetic outbursts are driven by powerful magnetic fields that rise up from its internal regions and twist, loop, and coil far out into space. In addition to these…
Coronal Loops
Seen in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths, bright coronal loops erupt from the edges of a sunspot in this image, a detail of a larger image captured by the SDO spacecraft earlier today. (Click to see the full-sized version.) Coronal loops are plasma-filled “tubes” that arc upwards from the Sun’s surface and reconnect at both ends. They…
Fo Sizzle
A beautiful photo by Alan Friedman showing a solar prominence twisting high – as in, tens of thousands of miles high – above the surface of the Sun. This image was taken on June 2, 2010 through Friedman’s hydrogen alpha telescope. This allows us to see the complex texture of the Sun’s surface, called the…
Lights in the Dark 