Alan Friedman 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 2010.
He’s still snapping away, and on August 17th took this lovely picture of a prominence erupting from the Sun’s surface:
[Click to enfilamentate.]
Isn’t that gorgeous? A prominence is a towering arc of material lifted off the Sun’s surface by intense magnetic fields. To give you an idea of how strong the magnetic forces are, a prominence can have a mass upwards of a hundred billion tons, and be cranked up thousands of kilometers off the Sun’s surface… despite the crushing gravity of nearly 30 times that of Earth’s!
And some people call the Sun "average". Ha!
Alan takes these images with a pretty nice ‘scope equipped with a filter that blocks all the light from the Sun except for a narrow slice of color preferentially emitted by warm hydrogen. He then inverts the image of the solar disk (but not anything on the limb or outside it), which is an old astronomy trick to make contrast more obvious to the eye.
This image is part of a much larger one showing much more of the solar edge, including another magnificent prominence. Amusingly (to me at least), when I saw the picture above, my first thought is that it looked like a sitting dragon, facing to the right, sniffing a fish floating in front of it (and given that I’m at Dragon*Con right now, I love this imagery even more). Then I realized it also looks like a dragon facing to the left, head down on the Sun’s edge, like it’s ready to pounce! I’d suggest staying out of its way; after all, this dragon would be about 150,000 km long: well over 10 times the size of the Earth.
Do you see it as a dragon too? Funny how once our minds latch onto a picture like that, it’s hard to not see it that way!
Related posts:
- A fiery angel erupts from the Sun
- Seriously jaw-dropping picture of the Sun
- The boiling, erupting Sun
- The Sun lets loose a HUGE explosion
September 2nd, 2011 at 7:08 am
I see the left-facing dragon, but the right-facing one is clearly a quadrapedal mammal (like a grizzly bear or a sabre-tooth cat or something).
Anyway it’s an awesome image.
September 2nd, 2011 at 7:12 am
Amazing photo. A couple nights ago I showed my son one of these photos of the sun. He’s in 3rd grade and is very interested in science (and math). I explained, the best I could to his 3rd grade mind, about what the Sun is made up of plasma contained in complex magnetic fields. He was amazed by the photos and I think he even understood, to a degree, my explanation about what it was made up of. (Even if he did ask if someone could “break” the Sun using a big enough magnet.)
Then he wanted to see photos of Jupiter and Pluto which led to a photo comparing their relative sizes. At one point, I put the laptop computer down with the size comparison photo on the screen. I pointed to a 3 foot tall stack of blocks that his 4 year old brother had built. I told him that if these were the planets, then the sun would be about as tall as the stack of blocks. Meanwhile, Earth was a tiny sphere onscreen.
I love these moments when my son and I discuss science.
September 2nd, 2011 at 7:15 am
Looks like a giant space prawn or something to me!
The colours here seem a bit .. odd .. to me too. Space looks too light purple and it all seems a little muted in colour.
Good photo though all the same – thanks.
Our Sun is actually in the top 5% of all stars for mass, luminosity and more.
90% of stars are on the core Hydrogen-fusing main sequence (incl. our Sun) with the other 10% being white dwarfs and less than 1% being giants, supergiants and hypergiants. Of the main sequence stars 80% are M spectral type red dwarfs – the most common and least massive stars which are so numerous they make up almost all our stellar neighbours – notable exceptions being the Alpha Centauri duo, Sirius & Procyon – but are so dim not a single one can be seen with the unaided human eye. Another 15% or so are orange dwarfs which are a bit dimmer and less massive than our Sun a handful of nearby examples such as Epsilon Eridani, Epsilon Indi and 61 Cygni. Our yellow dwarf Sun is at class G2 fairly bright for a G type dwarf star – brighter and larger than most such as Tau Ceti, Alpha Mensae and Groombridge 1830.
Only 4% or so of stars belong to spectral types F & A and less than 1% are the brightest, most massive and bluest types B & O.
Average our Daytime Star is NOT!
Of course, the much rarer but brighter blue O & B type dwarfs, Sirian & Procyonese stars and giants and supergiants do dominate our night skies but still ..
September 2nd, 2011 at 7:35 am
I guess most readers here will be familiar enough with Tau Ceti (spectral class G8 V for comparison, our Sun is G2 V – V simply meaning ‘main sequence dwarf’ and numbers running G0 to G9 from most massive and hottest to least massive and faintest) But for those who might not have heard of & want more info on Groombridge 1830 – a nearby high proper motion or apparently fast-moving star – see :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groombridge_1830
Plus see :
http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/alphamen.html
for more about Alpha Mensae – the faintest of the brightest “Alpha” stars.
Whilst a quick look at this listing of 721 very to mildly prominent stars arranged by spectral class :
http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/class.html
Via Kaler’s superb ‘Stars’ website shows how the majority of unaided eye stars are of the well above average – but exceptionally rare – spectral classes O, B, A & F – and supergiants, giants and sub-giants.
September 2nd, 2011 at 7:48 am
After looking for a dragon, I can see the left-facing one. I still don’t see the right-facing one that Phil originally saw.
September 2nd, 2011 at 8:06 am
I confess I was thinking “dragon” when I looked at the prominence, but… *blush* I couldn’t help but see a pony.
I don’t think that’s a dragon, I think that’s Celestia, guiding the sun on its journey. And Celestia is 20% cooler than a dragon.
September 2nd, 2011 at 8:08 am
@ ^ Mark : Celestia is a pretty neat planetarium software program too!
(Click my name for the wiki-page.)
September 2nd, 2011 at 8:10 am
This is a great image.
Just out of interest, Fr Angelo Secchi SJ (1818-78) studied solar prominences and corona during solar eclipses and was the first to confirm that these phenomena did indeed belong to the Sun and were not artefacts of a solar eclipse. He also discovered solar spicules. Indeed the SECCHI instrument onboard the STEREO probes is named after him.
If Fr Secchi were alive today I’m sure he’d be really impressed with Alan’s work.
September 2nd, 2011 at 8:14 am
I saw a dragon, but I must have been influenced to think “dragon” by the post’s title.
September 2nd, 2011 at 8:35 am
Seeing more of a right facing Sabre Toothed Tiger.
September 2nd, 2011 at 9:01 am
But of course the Sun has little influence on the climate… /sarc
September 2nd, 2011 at 9:28 am
Stunning pics!
Just WOW.
September 2nd, 2011 at 9:29 am
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon!
September 2nd, 2011 at 9:58 am
Awesome picture. I see both dragons, I saw the right facing one and the fish at first glance, then the left facing after I read people saw it.
It is an impressive picture, partially due to real skill, but mostly due to the fact that this guy can drop almost $20,000 on a system to take pictures of the sun. Of course the mount, which is almost half the cost, is also used for night time astronomy so that mitigates the cost somewhat. Once you can get a set up like that you mostly just need patience and practice to get pictures like this. I would guess, based on the size of the rings, the quality of these items, and the fact that few amateurs even at my level buy only one telescope, that this guy is hundreds of thousands of dollars into his hobby.
I’m just jealous, as my wife isn’t really happy about the few thousand I’ve spend on telescopes over the years.
September 2nd, 2011 at 9:59 am
I see a stalking T-Rex to the left and two bison, one standing one laying down, to the right.
September 2nd, 2011 at 10:38 am
Lucy Van Pelt: Aren’t the clouds beautiful? They look like big balls of cotton. I could just lie here all day and watch them drift by. If you use your imagination, you can see lots of things in the cloud’s formations. What do you think you see, Linus?
Linus Van Pelt: Well, those clouds up there look to me look like the map of the British Honduras on the Caribbean.
[points up]
Linus Van Pelt: That cloud up there looks a little like the profile of Thomas Eakins, the famous painter and sculptor. And that group of clouds over there…
[points]
Linus Van Pelt: …gives me the impression of the Stoning of Stephen. I can see the Apostle Paul standing there to one side.
Lucy Van Pelt: Uh huh. That’s very good. What do you see in the clouds, Charlie Brown?
Charlie Brown: Well… I was going to say I saw a duckie and a horsie, but I changed my mind.
September 2nd, 2011 at 11:25 am
Nice post, Phil – Awesome picture Alan! Good on Ya.
I have a 5yr daughter and have similar moments with her (less advanced stages yet.. Just getting to general relativity next week ). Nitpick: It is gravity that confines the plasma of stars. Magnetic fields just messes up the atmosphere above the visible surface, and makes some sun-/star-spots in the surface and sometimes they run solar-/stellar-activity cycles. The surface I talk about is, of course, not solid – it is just a sharp drop in temperature and density which results in most of the light we see to be coming from a 130km thin layer called the photosphere. That layer is only 1/5500 of the radius of the sun – that is why it looks so sharp in pictures.
TechyDad @ 3: Your story warms my heart
Cheers, Regner
September 2nd, 2011 at 11:53 am
Oh NO its GODZILLA !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
September 2nd, 2011 at 12:14 pm
@Regner Trampedach,
True. I believe I was trying to explain a “sun explosion” video to him when I got into the complex magnetic fields. Meanwhile, my 4 year old was insisting that the sun was on fire.
My other recent science talk with my 8 year old involved the immune system since he was about to get the flu shot. I compared it to giving a bunch of police a wanted poster of a bad guy. Without the wanted poster (vaccine), the police (white blood cells) might not realize that the bad guy (germ/virus) is a bad guy and let him by. By the time they realize, he’d have multiplied into a thousand bad guys and would be hard to take down. Instead, they see the bad guy, remember the wanted poster, and take him down quickly. Of course, my son instantly called the bad guys Doctor Octopus & Venom and the white blood cells Spider-Man. That only made me prouder of him.
September 2nd, 2011 at 1:11 pm
Sweet picture and scope. I have a TeleVue TV-85 and while it is a fine apo refractor in its own right, I can’t but help lusting after the Astro-Physics setup that Alan has!
September 2nd, 2011 at 7:10 pm
Looks like the top of my head after a little too much time in 95+ degree heat.
September 2nd, 2011 at 11:55 pm
@ 11. GT : But of course the Sun has little influence on the climate… /sarc
It used to – before human climate forcing by greenhouse gas emisions took over. Nowdays not so much.
Watch :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Sf_UIQYc20&list=PL029130BFDC78FA33&index=59&feature=plpp
& this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmGIOMN-F4I
(5 minute 50 sec in esp. in that second one.)
Plus read :
http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming-intermediate.htm
which observes that :
Incidentally, that’s the second most popular – and long debunked Human Induced Rapid Global Overheating (HIRGO) myth according to the Skeptical Science site. I would recomend checking there (among other places) before posting any supposed “argument” against the consensus that HIRGO is real and a serious issue because otherwise you risk looking fairly foolish.
Or just stop and think for a second – do you really think climatologists would be so thick that they’d overlook the possible influence of our Sun on our climate?
September 3rd, 2011 at 5:51 am
I always hear the music from “Life on Earth” when I see images like this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc2qhUVn8Fc
Having looked at the video again though I realise how much solar photography has improved since the 1970s!
September 3rd, 2011 at 9:11 am
A beast facing right, bottom sitting, up on front legs. As he blows a wisp of smoke at his child sitting up on hind quarters and balancing with his tail. Father and Sun.
September 3rd, 2011 at 11:24 am
[...] have never seen a picture of the sun quite like this. It’s more like a picture on the [...]
September 3rd, 2011 at 3:10 pm
At first I also saw the right facing saber toothed tiger catching its prey. Only later I recognized the left facing dragon.