I keep thinking there’s nothing new under the Sun– or on it. With SOHO, and SDO, and a thousand other telescopes pointed at it, it would take something pretty freaking cool to surprise me.
Well then. Surprise!
Holy solar retinopathy! That’s the Sun?
Yup. But this is not a space-based image from some bazillion dollar observatory! This phenomenal picture was taken by astrophotographer Alan Friedman with this relatively small (but very, very nice) ‘scope. He shot it on October 20th, and it shows our nearest star in the light of hydrogen, specifically what astronomers call Hα (H-alpha). I’ll get to that in a sec…
In this picture you can see sunspots, giant convection cells, and the gas that follows magnetic loops piercing the Sun’s surface. When we see them against the Sun’s surface they’re called filaments, and when they arc against the background sky on the edge of the Sun’s disk they’re called prominences.
The image he took is amazingly high-resolution! He has two closeups, one of the filament and sunspot near the edge of the disk on the left, and the other of prominences leaping up off the edge and silhouetted against the sky:
Wow, that’s breathtaking! They look so delicate, probably because they make the Sun look fuzzy, like a comfy blanket… but have no doubts on the fury and scale of what you’re seeing here. See that little bright spot on the plume on the left, just above the Sun’s edge? That spot is the same size as the Earth. The image to the right should make that fairly clear; I made the Earth pretty close to the right size for comparison. Our planet is about 13,000 km (8000 miles) in diameter, so that one minor prominence is roughly 50,000 km high. That’s 30,000 miles. And it’s positively dwarfed by the Sun itself. A million Earths could fit inside the Sun.
In case you woke up today feeling important.
I want to note that there’s a freaky optical illusion I get when I look at the top picture: if I look at one part, say the right hand edge, then quickly move my eye to the top, it appears as if the whole disk of the Sun shrinks for a moment. It’s one of those really weird illusions that’s very difficult to pin down. Anyone else see it?
Now, about that picture and how it works…
The Sun’s surface puts out light at all wavelengths, but the surface isn’t solid. It’s a gas, and it tapers off with height. Normally, a thin gas in space emits light at very specific colors as electrons jump from one energy level to another in the individual atoms. But compressed gas in the thicker, denser part of the Sun mashes together all those energies, spreading them out, so it emits white light (that layer of the Sun is called the photosphere). Above that layer, where the gas is thinner (in a layer called the chromosphere), the hydrogen does emit light at specific colors. One of these, Hα, is in the red part of the spectrum, and in fact hot, thin hydrogen emits very strongly in Hα.
By plopping a filter in front of a telescope, you can block a lot of the light from the photosphere but let light from the chromosphere through. That’s what Alan Friedman did — he used a filter that let through a very narrow range of colors centered on Hα — to get this stunning picture. Well that, plus quite a bit of image processing! But everything you’re seeing there is real, and is happening on the Sun.
[Update: well, mea culpa: the next paragraph is wrong. I got a note from Alan: he inverted the picture of the disk of the Sun to enhance contrast. I didn't realize this, and assumed it was natural. I knew the Sun was naturally limb-darkened in visible light due to the way gas absorbs and emits light, and also that the chromosphere was thin, so it made sense to me that in Hα the Sun would be limb-brightened. Worse, I've done a lot of work with nebulae and other objects that are thin shells of gas, making them limb-brightened too. All this together led me to write the following paragraph, which turns out to be incorrect! My apologies for that, and hope it hasn't confused anyone! Now I'm off to figure out just why what I said was wrong, and the Sun is limb darkened even in Hα.]
Oh– see how the Sun gets brighter near the edge and darker in the middle? That’s not an illusion, it’s real. The gas emitting Hα light is like a thick shell surrounding the Sun’s surface (like an atmosphere). When we look straight down on the middle of the Sun we’re looking through a few thousand kilometers of it, but as you look closer to the edge you’re seeing through more and more of the gas. The more gas you see, the more light it emits, so the edge looks brighter. In white light, the opposite is true; the Sun is dark at the edges… but that’s complicated enough that I’ll just send you here to find out why.
All in all, an amazing and somewhat unsettling picture of a star seen close up. And it’s funny: there’s nothing in this picture I didn’t know about, or have some familiarity with. But somehow, the way Alan presents it, this picture really is amazingly different.
I like seeing familiar things in new ways. It jolts me out of complacency. What more can a skeptical scientist ask for?
Tip o’ the sunshade to Jason Major, and of course Alan Friedman for giving me permission to post his images!
Related posts:
- SDO lunar transit: now with video!
- The Sun rises again
- One solar piece of flare
- Solar storms coming our way this week?
- Two solar ISS transits!
October 28th, 2010 at 7:19 am
Dare I say, Brilliant!
October 28th, 2010 at 7:26 am
Top image looks similar to an oocyte (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oocyte). Somewhat startling when you contemplate the size differences.
October 28th, 2010 at 7:32 am
Wowzers. I didn’t know you could take images like that from Earth that weren’t from a professional scope!
October 28th, 2010 at 7:33 am
Umm… Err… Uhh…
“Wow”!
October 28th, 2010 at 7:45 am
So that is how Dr. Manhattan sees the sun…
Wish I could…
October 28th, 2010 at 7:48 am
Better than brilliant – its superluminous!
Awesome, awesome, strange and awesome solar imaging.
Thanks.
October 28th, 2010 at 7:51 am
The image belongs in a gallery or museum. It is art.
October 28th, 2010 at 8:08 am
@Phil:
Well, then that:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap980605.html
is still the best “picture” of the sun available…
October 28th, 2010 at 8:08 am
“A million Earths could fit inside the Sun.” Every time I hear that I get Why Does the Sun Shine running through my head. Particularly one live version I used to have:
“If the sun were hollow, a million Earths would fit inside. But they can’t, because that would be too f****d up!”
October 28th, 2010 at 8:08 am
Worship the Sun!! lol. Those are stunning picture’s, really awe-inspiring!
October 28th, 2010 at 8:10 am
Oddly enough the image reminds me of a zygote…
October 28th, 2010 at 8:13 am
Many fine amateur images can be seen on the Cloudy Nights Solar forum in h-Alpha, CaK and white light. The sun is HUGE and relatively close, so seeing fine detail from the earth can be accomplished with fairly small scopes.
October 28th, 2010 at 8:14 am
Dang… I thought that was from a NASA observatory. Well done!
October 28th, 2010 at 8:24 am
I hope Alan appreciates your glowing reports. He certainly has a lot of bright ideas.
October 28th, 2010 at 8:24 am
My pleasure, Phil….I love Alan’s work. I still can’t believe he gets these shots from his !@&% backyard! Thank heavens he uses his powers for good and not evil (I think)….
October 28th, 2010 at 8:27 am
very very very etc nice photo! Alan is talented!
October 28th, 2010 at 8:30 am
Sweet!
October 28th, 2010 at 8:39 am
Spectacular picture! The level of detail, man!
October 28th, 2010 at 8:47 am
Amazing photo… wow…
October 28th, 2010 at 8:53 am
WHOA. I SO have to take up space photography.
October 28th, 2010 at 8:53 am
His other photos from day are just as amazing:
October 28th, 2010 at 9:01 am
VY Canis Majoris makes our Sun look like a speck of dust. And the Universe makes VY Canis Majoris insignificant.
October 28th, 2010 at 9:24 am
WOW, that is just …. (NO WORDS). This really makes me think to invest in a relatively small telescope, because this image is much nicer than anything I have done on a professional telescope. (not that I have ever observed the sun, but still …)
October 28th, 2010 at 9:36 am
I am in awe.
October 28th, 2010 at 9:50 am
” Our planet is about 13,000 km (8000 miles) in diameter, so that one minor prominence is roughly 50,000 km high. That’s 30,000 miles. And it’s positively dwarfed by the Sun itself. A million Earths could fit inside the Sun.”
yes, I’ve done for the students since 1988 a simple sunspot activity: get a small telescope , aim on sun and project sun’s photosphere on a screen. (NEVER LOOK AT SUN DIRECTLY, I DON’T EVEN LOOK AT IT WITH A THICK FILTER, THAT’S HOW JITTERY I AM ABOUT THAT) . Then measure the diameter of the solar disk in millimeters, and the size of the spot in millimeters. Take the ratio of these and the number will be a small fraction. Now multiply this small fraction by the number 1,400,000 kilometers (the real diameter of sun) to get the size of the spot in kilometers, and you’ll almost always find this bigger (lot bigger usually) than earth diameter of 13,000 km.
This blog image is the most amazing of the photosophere and chromosphere I’ve seen. (a) usually the photosphere is puntuctuated by “granulation: bright and darker areas like a mottling appearearance”, but here you can see the reality: 3 dimension views of the convection cells.
(b) the “spicules” can be seen clearly as a fuzz around the limb like little spikes of gas rising into the chromosphere.
October 28th, 2010 at 9:55 am
Is it just me or do the plumes look fake, like they’re generated by a particle system in a video game?
October 28th, 2010 at 9:56 am
I definitely have that optical illusion you’re talking about. In fact I looked at the sun a little too long and now I’m feeling kinda nauseated. I expect the effect has to do with the complementary colors in the picture and my particular vision anomaly where I have one bookworm eye and one hawk eye. They take turns trying to make things more in focus than they really are. Hurray for spasms of accommodation.
October 28th, 2010 at 10:01 am
@Astronomovie: Realize that this image was taken with a specialized Hydrogen Alpha scope which while small, are very expensive for their size. An 80mm hAlpha scope is about 3X the cost of an 80mm apochromatic triplet.
Not trying to discourage you, if you’ve got it, spend it. But most get severe sticker shock when they price solar scopes.
October 28th, 2010 at 10:14 am
“Spalding” must be on the other side (the dark side?).
October 28th, 2010 at 10:16 am
The top picture reminds me of a microscope photo of a virus. This is a very cool picture, stunning really. Thank you for sharing, it keeps me thinking.
October 28th, 2010 at 10:17 am
Hmmm. There was supposed to be a picture of a basketball in my post. I’ll have to figure out why it didn’t show up.
October 28th, 2010 at 11:31 am
Nice work Alan!
This is the most exciting new hobby in astronomy folks. There are about 20 or so of us over at cloudy nights. Come on over and let us explain it all to you and get you started…
October 28th, 2010 at 12:16 pm
I thought it was an egg about to be fertilized.
October 28th, 2010 at 12:29 pm
Spectacular!
And yes, the optical illusion is there for me as well…
Must be one of those nasty software bugs built in the visual cortex
October 28th, 2010 at 12:31 pm
And to think it,s only temporary and will someday be gone……
October 28th, 2010 at 12:51 pm
You can get pics like this with modest equipment from the ground if you are good…really good. Alan is really good.
@Astronomovie The least expensive H-alpha telescope, the PST, starts at about $500 without a mount. The PST is nice for introductory visual observing, but you need something bigger and with a narrower bandpass to get photos like this. I have a PST and it gives nice views…but there are days I envy the bigger scopes!
Phil, you need to get yourself a PST so you can do some H-alpha observing…then you would know that the Sun is limb darkened in H-alpha light
October 28th, 2010 at 2:27 pm
An idle question for anyone who knows the answer: when you say “A million Earths could fit inside the Sun” does this mean the volume of the sun is one million time the volume of the earth, or that one million spheres the size of the earth could fit in a sphere the size of the sun? I think there is a difference but don’t have the math chops to answer the second part of the question (at least without cracking open a 40-year-old high school geometry book).
Awesome picture BTW.
October 28th, 2010 at 4:07 pm
The sun is truly an amazing and beautiful object. This perspective cements that opinion even more. Thank you for sharing.
October 28th, 2010 at 4:32 pm
I see the optical illusion. I attribute it to the extremely high contrast. Beautiful picture.
October 28th, 2010 at 4:39 pm
@26 It looks fake because it is fake. The sun doesn’t really exist. It’s really just a really bright lightbulb in the sky, and it’s not one of those compact flourescents either, the sun is old school.
October 28th, 2010 at 5:15 pm
Your admission of mistake is more important than anything you wrote. For science, etc.
Thank you.
October 28th, 2010 at 5:16 pm
Guys: the sun is 100x the diameter of earth. That means 100 x 100 x 100 times the volume.
There’s your millions times.
October 28th, 2010 at 5:18 pm
One last small point. When a nuke goes off, its apparent temperature is near that of the sun. But the area subtended by the 5000K surface is much larger than the half-degree of Sol, so you
burn.
Just trying to help with the physicsgrok.
October 28th, 2010 at 5:59 pm
@37. Charlie: a million Earths could fit inside the Sun. About 109 Earths could be placed across the equatorial width of the Sun.
Here’s a diagram I made up using info I scrounged up on various general-science answer sites: http://lightsinthedark.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/sun_vs_earth.jpg
I’ve heard it said that the Sun comprises 98% of all the matter in our entire solar system! Not sure how that’s measured exactly, but it sounds impressive.
October 28th, 2010 at 6:19 pm
and there was me thinking it was the wheel of a giant chariot
October 28th, 2010 at 7:46 pm
@37. Charlie, I did a (very) rough calcuation for you.
It would take 1.3 million earths to fill the sun if they were melted down and poured in like a liquid.
It would take about 220 thousand earths to fill the sun, assuming the earth is in fact a cube of the same diametre.
So I’m going to take a guess and say the actual answer, for the earth as a solid sphere, is about 300-400 thousand.
October 28th, 2010 at 7:51 pm
@44. J Major – thanks. I decided to query Wolfram Alpha for the vol.sun/vol.earth = approx. 1,300,000. I’d like to see the math showing how many BB-earths could fit in the basketball-sun. Maybe I’ll try to work it out but it’s been a while since I’ve done that kind of math.
October 28th, 2010 at 8:35 pm
@47 Charlie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-packing_of_spheres
Hexagonal close packing (or face-centered cubic) can utilize about ~74% of available space. (Of course this ignores the boundary of the sun, but since the sun is *pretty big* I think we can ignore it.)
So you can get 1.3 million * 74% = ~960 thousand earths.
Pretty close to a million earths, I’d say.
October 28th, 2010 at 8:58 pm
My first thought was of a human ovum. Brilliant capture.
October 28th, 2010 at 11:52 pm
pretty…..
October 29th, 2010 at 7:38 am
[...] big block party? Let the kids go Trick or Treat and stop being such a smothering killjoy.How about a few stunning pictures of The Sun, not taken by a bazillion-dollar space telescope? /**/ Tags: Linky Love Posted by Jimmie Links [...]
October 29th, 2010 at 8:12 am
Amazing. Looks like something you’d see under a microscope.
October 29th, 2010 at 8:34 am
what would the consistancy of the suns material “feel” or be like…if you could be on the surface, and scoop some up in a sample container, etc…is it vaporous, like a cloud, lightly gaseous like fire..perhaps thicker, with a feel and consistancy like a liquid? forget the heat, the radiaiton, the roiling…does anyone have any thoughts on how it might feel.
October 29th, 2010 at 9:58 am
The sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma/The sun’s not simply made out of gas, no, no, no…
/they_might_be_giants
October 29th, 2010 at 12:41 pm
@53 scott: Hmm… Interesting question. My two cents: That depends where on the sun you are (the outer atmosphere, the visible surface, the core?) The plasma is compressed by gravity more and more toward the core, so it’d act more or less like a gas, but with greater and greater density.
@54 charlotte: I’m a new TMBG fan now
October 29th, 2010 at 12:44 pm
That optical illusion you speak of can probably be attributed to simultaneous contrast and the afterimage effect. It causes a sort of vibration between the orange and blue because they are complements and gives that shrinking effect- I see it, too.
October 29th, 2010 at 2:01 pm
[...] image was left out of the lot—but it is one of the coolest pictures of the sun I’ve ever [...]
October 29th, 2010 at 5:32 pm
[...] others (see below), are being featured in myriad magazines at the moment, ranging from Wired.com, Discover Magazine and Telegraph. Alan Friedman, president of Buffalo Astronomical Association Inc, shot the images [...]
October 29th, 2010 at 6:11 pm
I’m always impressed by these high quality solar images. We experience the sun as a constant thing. It’s very stable on human timescales. And of course it’s so bright that, without technology, it’s just a blindingly bright disk in the sky.
Then when we can really look at it, you discover this turbulent, fractal-like quality. It is both stable and chaotic. Chaos at a micro scale but startlingly stable and predictable at the macro level. And of course there is the whole “hidden life of Sol” angle.
Great stuff.
October 29th, 2010 at 9:03 pm
[...] Via Discover Magazine [...]
October 30th, 2010 at 12:42 am
[...] of our solar system’s star using a filter to capture Hα (H-alpha) light waves, which Discover Magazine defines as “the light of [...]
October 30th, 2010 at 1:12 am
[...] שמחפש את ההסבר המדעי אפשר למצא אותו כאן. הנה כמה תגים עיקריים: טמפרטורות עצומות, מערבולות [...]
October 30th, 2010 at 10:03 am
[...] Fotografía del sol realizada con filtro H-alfa ( Eng ) blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/10/28/the-bo… por Tarod7 hace 2 segundos [...]
October 30th, 2010 at 11:35 am
[...] To see a much bigger version, and to read more about the taking of this shot, check out the Wired article on it. To read more specifics about the astronomical phenomena visible in the photo (and to see a pretty boggling superimposition of the Earth on it), check out Bad Astronomy. [...]
October 30th, 2010 at 3:01 pm
[...] » noticia original [...]
October 30th, 2010 at 3:59 pm
[...] Y para más información detallada respecto al análisis de estas imágenes aquí. [...]
October 30th, 2010 at 8:15 pm
It’s only a 3D composition.
October 31st, 2010 at 1:54 pm
[...] ad. Believe it or not that detailed image of the Sun was taken with a backyard telescope! Bad Astronomer — Phil Plait features some other pictures of the Sun, taken by Alan Friedman, who used a special filter that [...]
November 1st, 2010 at 5:49 am
What? The sun is NOT a gas, it’s a plasma. Gas can’t follow magnetic field lines, it’s electrically neutral. Plasma is ionized, thus, the ability to flow along the sun’s magnetic fields. C’mon Phil, get it right.
November 1st, 2010 at 9:07 am
Wow – Alan’s pics are really getting a lot of (well-deserved) press!!! Awesome!
November 2nd, 2010 at 12:25 am
[...] Esta foto fue tomada por el fenomenal astrofotógrafo Alan Friedman, el 20 de octubre, y muestra nuestra estrella más cercana a la “luz de hidrógeno”, en concreto lo que los astrónomos llaman Hα (H-alfa). En esta foto se puede ver las manchas solares, células gigantes de convección, y el gas que forma bucles magnéticos perforando la superficie del sol. Cuando los vemos contra la superficie del Sol son llamados filamentos, y cuando forman un arco sobre el cielo de fondo en el borde del disco del Sol se llaman prominencias. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/10/28/the-boiling-erupting-sun/ [...]
November 2nd, 2010 at 1:53 pm
[...] Balmer spectrum lines given off by Hydrogen being ionized, H-alpha is on the far right:From the Discovery Blog, on how this whole process works:The Sun’s surface puts out light at all wavelengths, but the [...]
November 3rd, 2010 at 11:55 am
[...] The boiling, erupting Sun | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine [...]
November 4th, 2010 at 1:54 am
[...] of our solar system’s star using a filter to capture Hα (H-alpha) light waves, which Discover Magazine defines as “the light of [...]
November 4th, 2010 at 4:59 pm
The article didn’t say what kind of camera and what type of lenses were used. I wish it did.
November 4th, 2010 at 8:04 pm
[...] up your desktop with some classy new images. Check out THIS, THIS and THIS for all your astronomical huge-image [...]
November 5th, 2010 at 6:02 am
[...] Phil Plait @ Discovery Magazine explains: The Sun’s surface puts out light at all wavelengths, but the surface isn’t solid. It’s a gas, and it tapers off with height. Normally, a thin gas in space emits light at very specific colors as electrons jump from one energy level to another in the individual atoms. But compressed gas in the thicker, denser part of the Sun mashes together all those energies, spreading them out, so it emits white light (that layer of the Sun is called the photosphere). Above that layer, where the gas is thinner (in a layer called the chromosphere), the hydrogen does emit light at specific colors. One of these, Hα, is in the red part of the spectrum, and in fact hot, thin hydrogen emits very strongly in Hα. [...]
November 9th, 2010 at 10:12 am
[...] Okay, ikke helt sandt, men det er stadig ret cool. Man kan læse og se mere her. [...]
December 18th, 2010 at 4:14 am
[...] is why Alan Friedman’s solar portrait blew me away when I saw it. It’s actually a composite of two pictures: the outer limb of the [...]
March 10th, 2011 at 5:04 am
[...] picture was taken by Alan Friedman, who is no stranger to this blog: his picture of the boiling Sun last year was hugely popular, and so amazing I featured it as one of my top pictures of 2010. And [...]
March 17th, 2011 at 1:35 am
Wow great pic.. and thanks for the info about vy canis majoris, that’s incredible too!
September 14th, 2011 at 3:10 pm
[...] is an “amateur” astronomer who takes astonishing images of the Sun. You may remember his picture of our star that was so cool I chose it as one of my Top 14 Pictures of [...]