Super Moon? How About a Super Sun!
“On May 5, 2012, while everyone else was waiting for the “Super Moon” astrophotographer Alan Friedman was out capturing this super image of a super Sun from his back yard in Buffalo, NY!
Taken with a specialized telescope that can image the Sun in hydrogen alpha light, Alan’s photo shows the intricate detail of our home star’s chromosphere — the layer just above its “surface”, or photosphere.
Prominences can be seen rising up from the Sun’s limb in several places, and long filaments — magnetically-suspended lines of plasma — arch across its face. The “fuzzy” texture is caused by smaller features called spicules and fibrils, which are short-lived spikes of magnetic fields that rapidly rise up from the surface of the Sun.
On the left side it appears that a prominence may have had just detached from the Sun’s limb, as there’s a faint cloud of material suspended there.”
our sun [x]
A solar eruption on 9 February and the ensuing cloud of particles that blasted into space over the next 10 hours. The sun itself was imaged in extreme ultraviolet during a coronal mass ejection. This orange image has been superimposed on a coronagraph (green) from the Stereo COR1 instrument.
Credit: GSFC/NASA
SOLAR ECLIPSE by UK Ravi on Flickr.
Nephelococcygia
It’s the long way of describing our love for seeing likenesses in the shapes of clouds. If you are bitten by this bug and find yourself with a solar telescope, watch out. The fantastic plumes of hydrogen plasma we call solar prominences seen at the edge of sun will tempt you to identify them in earthly forms. I once set out to classify a bunch and this was the result. A Yeti, a bonsai, Don Quixote, the angel that fell to earth… there’s even one that looks like me or did, when I wore a goatee. Click on the picture to see the big version from my website. Each image there is a hot link to a little bit of averted imagination. Enjoy!