[HN Gopher] Highest-resolution images ever captured of the sun's...
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Highest-resolution images ever captured of the sun's surface
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 347 points
Date : 2024-11-23 10:01 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| incognito124 wrote:
| Actual zoomable images here:
| https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Solar_...
| openrisk wrote:
| not sure if its the server traffic or browser limitations but
| zooming and panning are quite slow and somewhat dent the
| awesomeness of this.
| Thorrez wrote:
| I don't experience those problems.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| While it works, the resolution is underwhelming and there's no
| scale.
| ballenf wrote:
| Would be great to see an earth or moon or country map outline
| for scale.
| belter wrote:
| The Earth is...Slightly smaller, than one of the darker
| spots you see on the visible radiation image. The first one
| from the left...
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Is this a solution they rolled on their own? Cause it's
| abysmal. I've seen Leaflet being used for gigapixel images and
| it's great, even if it seems unorthodox.
| jraph wrote:
| Leaflet is actually listed at [1], I believe it's totally
| orthodox :-)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Image_Interop
| era...
| Thorrez wrote:
| OpenSeadragon, the one they're using, is also listed there.
| First on the list.
| Thorrez wrote:
| They're using OpenSeadragon hosted on a codepen.
|
| https://openseadragon.github.io/
|
| https://codepen.io/Kimtaro88/embed/JjgLyJg/ee2ebbe7041869032.
| ..
| lumb63 wrote:
| I'm astounded by how plain and round the visible light images
| are. Why is the corona only visible in the UV images, if it is,
| according to the article, visible from earth?
| willis936 wrote:
| It might be that the surface is much brighter in visible light
| than the corona rather than the corona emits no visible light
| (as anyone who witnessed the recent total solar eclipse can
| attest). Since the corona is made up of rarefied high energy
| particles I would expect it to emit less total, but more short
| wavelength light.
| sega_sai wrote:
| Corona is very hot (millions of degrees) as opposed to 6000 of
| the Sun's surface, therefore it has higher contrast over Sun's
| surface if you go to shorter wavelengths. The reason corona is
| still visible from Earth is because it you mask the main solar
| disk (during the eclipse).
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| I'm guessing they mask out the edges. Maybe for exposure
| reasons or something?
| grues-dinner wrote:
| The scale and violence of the processes that drive the Sun are
| really mind-blowing. 43 million km away and it's getting on for
| 20kW per square metre. Edit: the probe is that far from the sun.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| And that is in all directions!
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > 43 million km away
|
| er, 149 million km away [0] not 43
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun
| grues-dinner wrote:
| The Solar Orbiter is 43 million km away from the Sun at its
| closest.
|
| If we got 17.5ish kW per square metre here on Earth, you'd
| know about it (but only briefly).
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Oops, my bad
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| Hm, the article seems to have gotten its units wrong.
| Normally I'd trust the article but 43 million kilometers
| seems to match best with its orbit I can find documentation
| for.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| I _was_ wrong with my initial jumping to conclusions, but
| on inspection I see that the underlying ESA press release
| [0] actually says "The images were taken when Solar
| Orbiter was less than 74 million kilometres from the
| Sun". Now I'm really confused.
|
| [0] https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science
| /Solar_...
| lovecg wrote:
| Well, they're _technically_ correct.
| popol12 wrote:
| Only 20kw per square meter on the surface of the sun ? How come
| it is so low ?
|
| We receive about 1kw of sunlight per square meter on Earth, and
| earth is 149M km from the sun. From napkin math, it should
| rather be ~45MW/sqm on the sun to receive 1kw/sqm on Earth
| (surface of the sphere of radius 149M km divided by surface of
| the sun gives ~45000, so 1 watt from the sun becomes 1/45000
| watt when it reaches the Earth)
|
| Where am I wrong ?
| grues-dinner wrote:
| Because that's the irradiance at the Solar Orbiter's closest
| approach (well, more like 17.5kW, hence getting on for).
|
| It's pretty amazing that you can have a spacecraft in nearly
| 20x direct sunlight, permanently and still have it actually
| work.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Your calculations are incorrect. Use common sense, models,
| and first principles. Light point source irradiance is E =
| P/4pr2, so inverse square law. It's 1361 W/m2 at Earth's
| distance of 1.5e11 m. Solar Orbiter dips down to 4.2e10 m.
| 1/4 the distance,
|
| Total solar power output = 4 * p * (1.5e11 [m])2 * 1361 [W] =
| 3.85e26 W/m2
|
| Sun's "surface" irradiance = TSPO / (4 * p * (6.96e8 [m])2) =
| 6.32e9 W/m2
|
| At Solar Orbiter's perihelion, assuming the distance from the
| Sun's point center rather than the Sun's surface = TSPO / (4
| * p * (4.2e10 [m])2) = 1.74e4 W/m2.
|
| ^ Except for Earth's irradiance and the distances, these are
| theoretical rough values rather than observed ones because
| reality is messier than simplified models.
| popol12 wrote:
| The real issue was that I didn't get that you were talking
| about Solar Orbiter, I thought you were saying that the
| irradiance of the sun was 20kW/m2, which seemed low to me,
| but I didn't even know the word "irradiance" so I didn't
| know what to type on Google to check it. Thanks for your
| detailed calculus :)
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| It's basic algebra. Calculus would involve derivatives or
| integrals.
| FredPret wrote:
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/calculus
|
| The usual sense involves integration and derivation but
| look at senses 2 & 4. It also means any calculation.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Fun fact: if the Solar System had an atmosphere that stretched
| from the Sun to the Earth (at least) then the sound of the Sun
| from Earth would be ~100dB.
|
| IIRC the Sun converts ~4.5 million tons of mass into energy
| _every second_ and even then, there are objects that are
| _trillions_ of times more energetic /violent. The first LIGO
| detection I believe converted 5 Solar masses into energy in
| about a second.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| You just reminded me of https://spacesounds.com which I
| remember seeing in the very early 2000s and thinking it was
| awesome.
|
| And 4.5 million tons of mass/second may be unimaginably huge,
| but the Sun is so big it can also do that constantly for
| literally billions and billions of years. And it's not even
| an especially big star!
| stouset wrote:
| One of the detections was of a merger that momentarily had a
| higher power output than the entire rest of the visible
| universe combined.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The scale/mass of the sun is just fascinating. It takes
| ~500,000 years for a photon released in the fusion process to
| escape the core. That's just how dense the core is that a
| photon gets bounced around that much. The fact that the outer
| layer (corona up to 3,500,000degF is so much hotter than the
| surface(photosphere around 10000degF) that is on top of the
| core (around 27,000,000degF) is just another one of those weird
| to appreciate as well.
| itishappy wrote:
| I think it's crazy how _little_ impact this giant constantly
| exploding ball of turbulent plasma has on our day to day lives.
| We get consistent light and heat, and occasional auroras... and
| that 's it? This thing has enough energy to wipe out every last
| trace of human existence.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| The Sun is eldritch horror. The test of being human is being
| fine with it.
| jeleh wrote:
| Best looking image ever captured of the Sun's entire surface goes
| to:
|
| https://x.com/AJamesMcCarthy/status/1638648459002806272
|
| by
|
| Andrew McCarthy: https://www.instagram.com/cosmic_background/
|
| Jason Guenzel: https://www.instagram.com/thevastreaches/
| casenmgreen wrote:
| Twitter say "something went wrong", plus three dialogues
| consuming or obscuring something more than half the page.
| sans_souse wrote:
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fr2elMpaMAAqgZN?format=jpg&name=...
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| That's beautiful, but not really a photo of the sun. It's
| heavily processed and digitally modified.
| andruby wrote:
| It's still a photo of the sun, even if processed. You
| wouldn't see much on an unprocessed photo of the sun..
| dylan604 wrote:
| What a disingenuous comment. It's not a generative AI image.
| It's not something someone drew/painted. It's photographic
| data combined together.
|
| If you want to be pedantic, every single picture ever taken
| with a digital camera is digitally modified. Every single
| image shot on film and scanned to be used on a computer is
| digitally modified.
|
| Just because _you_ can 't take a photo of the sun anywhere
| close to this does not mean others of us cannot, and does not
| make their actual images of the sun not real. Using proper
| filters so you do not melt your equipment allows for images
| of the photosphere to be captured. Using the moon to filter
| the photosphere during an eclipse allows the corona to be
| seen. It's not like it's not there except during an eclipse.
| It's just too faint to be captured without the filter.
|
| That's what the SRO uses a cornograph to block the
| photosphere at all times to be able to image the corona.
|
| Imaging the sun is very fun and challenging, and I'd suggest
| you'd learn a lot from reading up on it. Whether you'd
| actually enjoy it is beyond the scope of this forum
| itishappy wrote:
| Sure, but they're not just combining, they're selecting for
| maximal artistic effect.
|
| > A geometrically altered image of the 2017 eclipse as an
| artistic element in this composition to display an
| otherwise invisible structure. Great care was taken to
| align the two atmospheric layers in a scientifically
| plausible way using NASA's SOHO data as a reference.
|
| https://cosmicbackground.io/products/fusion-of-helios
|
| I mean, take a look at some of the photographers other
| work...
|
| https://cosmicbackground.io/products/tales-from-the-solar-
| sy...
| stouset wrote:
| Okay and?
| wholinator2 wrote:
| What do you mean, and? They're clarifying the original
| point, as was expressly requested in the parent comment.
| The image undoubtedly has some amount of "artistic
| freedom" taken. What threshold decides when an image
| becomes more art than science is a parameter that each
| person is free to decide for themselves. I think it's
| absolutely relevant to discussion to point out that there
| might be more "artistic freedom" in this image than most
| might believe, especially when the post is about photos
| of the sun of a much more scientific and exact nature.
| cornstalks wrote:
| For anyone that wants to buy the 139 megapixel image for
| printing, it's $50 here:
| https://cosmicbackground.io/products/fusion-of-helios
|
| I'm not affiliated, but I've been seriously debating it for a
| long time. The photo is a composite of the sun and the sun's
| heliosphere from the 2017 eclipse. One of my favorite images of
| the Sun.
| financetechbro wrote:
| I am very tempted now
| rr808 wrote:
| Do you think that is original or some AI enhanced copy of the
| twitter img?
| cornstalks wrote:
| It's the original. Andrew McCarthy links to it from both
| his Twitter and Instagram accounts. It's his own website.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| I have to imagine capturing an image over five days shows how
| _static_ something is, not dynamic. Very confusing wording
| there! Great photo, though.
| itishappy wrote:
| It's not quite a time lapse. They took 90000 images, but they
| will be selecting the sharpest and most interesting subset
| for each section of image, not just smearing them all
| together.
| _xerces_ wrote:
| Maybe static vs. dynamic have different meanings when talking
| about celestial objects that are billions of years old,
| 864,000 miles across and a million times the size of the
| planet you're living on?
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| I agree! Very odd choice of words indeed. I wonder what
| semantics they were trying to convey.
| static_motion wrote:
| Big fan of Andrew McCarthy's work, been following him on IG for
| a few years now. The stuff he's able to pull off as a backyard
| astrophotographer is very impressive.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| I thought Sol was basically white? very yellow/orange in the
| left-most image.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| No, Sol does not output equally across the spectrum. I'm
| assuming this is artificially colored on some level, though.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Not colored, but filtered. At least for the specific "orange"
| image. The other images are since they're different types of
| sensors.
|
| If you view the sun with eclipse glasses, you basically see
| the "orange" image just with your eyes. Add the same level of
| filtering to a telescope or long lens on your camera, and you
| can capture similar image.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Well, it sure does look white if you form its image on a
| white piece of paper, so I think it's pretty fair to call it
| white.
| toss1 wrote:
| Indeed, good qstn.
|
| The sun is emitting light at _roughly_ the spectrum curve of a
| (non-ideal) black body at 5778degK [1].
|
| The 'black body' curve is the idealized electromagnetic
| spectral emission curve of how every body 'glows' according to
| temperature. [0] The peak of the sun's emission curve is around
| 500nm which is a blue-green, but of course it is spread out
| across a broad spectrum so is closer to white, and then it is
| differentially scattered by the atmosphere.
|
| But these photos have no atmospheric filtering or scattering,
| so, perhaps the yellow-orange hue is more related to their own
| filters?
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation
|
| [1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/130209/how-
| can-i...
| itishappy wrote:
| We typically _define_ the Sun to be white, but it has an
| interesting spectrum. White is just "all of the colors" and
| the Sun happens to be the object providing most of our light.
| In a very real sense, we try to make light bulbs "Sun colored."
|
| This image is colored because it uses a red filter:
|
| > The instrument collected red light with a wavelength of 617
| nanometres.
|
| One last thought, because I think it's fun. The Sun looks
| yellow to us on Earth because the sky is blue. Think about it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_illuminant
|
| https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-B97804431878650...
| hulitu wrote:
| > Highest-resolution images ever captured of the sun's entire
| surface
|
| Did the probe revolves around sun ?
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| https://googlethatforyou.com?q=Solar%20Orbiter
| grues-dinner wrote:
| Firstly the Sun itself rotates roughly once a month, and
| secondly if the probe wasn't going round the sun, it would be
| called the Solar Impactor, not the Solar Orbiter. Or maybe the
| Solar Evaporated Slag Cloud when it got close enough.
| airstrike wrote:
| I just wanted to say I appreciate every single one of your
| comments on this thread but this one even more so
| lovecg wrote:
| Well it could also be in the Sun's equivalent of a
| geostationary orbit. If ChatGPT is not making things up this
| would be around 60 million km which is quite feasible.
| alfiopuglisi wrote:
| It's quite difficult with current rocket technology: you
| have to counteract most of the Earth-given 30km/s speed
| around the Sun in order to get close (it's smaller than
| Mercury's orbit), and then brake again to circularize the
| orbit once you are there. I am not sure that it can be done
| with what we have now. That said, it's not that far off
| either.
| martinpw wrote:
| I guess ChatGPT is making things up because it is much less
| than that. Closer to 25million km, although complicated by
| the fact that the sun does not rotate as a rigid body but
| instead rotates faster at the equator than the poles.
| User23 wrote:
| Displaying this would be a fun use of the Las Vegas Sphere.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| > The process took more than four hours, since the spacecraft had
| to change position for each individual photograph. In the final
| mosaics, the sun's diameter is almost 8,000 pixels across.
|
| I'm guessing this is sort of equivalent to manual supersampling
| rather than combining adjacent (ie visually translated to the
| next subsquare of the photo) viewpoints? Four hours is a pretty
| short time for 48 million miles of distance.
|
| Edit: well considering orbital velocity I guess they probably
| just zigzag'd perpendicular to the orbital plane?
| maplant wrote:
| I will be avoiding looking at them directly so I don't hurt my
| eyes
| Larrikin wrote:
| Is there no PNG or JPG? A lot of these space photos make nice
| backgrounds, but they're increasingly being displayed in weird
| zoomable only on a web page galleries
| itishappy wrote:
| https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/11/PHI_s_view...
|
| https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/11/PHI_s_map_...
|
| https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/11/PHI_s_velo...
|
| https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/11/EUI_s_view...
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| How crazy is it that sun spots look like skin cancer, or skin
| cancer looks like sun spots.
| Bengalilol wrote:
| I am puzzled by the << sun in visible light >> picture: what is
| this # in the middle of it? (Physical phenomenom, or artifact
| from the pictures)
| Thorrez wrote:
| Oh yeah, that is interesting. I would guess an artifact from
| the pictures. Maybe those are the lines where they joined the
| different pictures together into 1 picture. I would think they
| could do a better job than that though.
| Bengalilol wrote:
| You can, somehow, view this # in the magnetic field map
| picture too. First I thought this was an artifact, but I
| highly doubt that they would leave such an amateur thing
| behind (and even amateurs don't get tricked into this).
| Besides from the visible picture and magnetic map, I don't
| seem to find any correlation with the other pictures.
| spyder wrote:
| That's definitely an artifact from stitching multiple images.
| But I'm not sure why they would leave it that way since it's
| quite noticeable, but I guess there is always some debate on
| how much post-processing should they do on a scientific images
| and some people prefer closer to the raw capture even if it's
| not perfect.
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| Every time I learn something new about the Sun or see photos like
| this it makes sense we used to worship it (and maybe we should
| bring that back.)
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Sometimes I stand in the sun and feel it as hot as a nearby
| oven on my skin. Then I consider that I'm receiving about 1e-24
| of its radiant energy. I don't blame our ancestors!
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| It's truly awe inspiring to know how inconceivably huge and
| far away the Sun is, yet it we can feel it's warmth, admire
| how it's light touches everything we see, and how it's
| responsible for all life on Earth. I love our star :)
| webdoodle wrote:
| This is great and all, but they are just snapshots in time. We
| need total 360 degree coverage of the sun 24/7. Stereo A and B
| did this great, but when Stereo B failed, it was never replaced.
| superkuh wrote:
| Yes, full coverage is needed. And not just of the lower
| lattitudes from the ecliptic plane. The _original Solar Orbiter
| proposal plan A was for a highly inclined orbit passing over
| the poles of the sun_. But this was too expensive and instead
| they went with just another generic spectroscopic imager in the
| ecliptic plane. It was such a disappointment.
|
| I wonder if the 4m DKIST on Earth would have higher resolution
| photomosaic of the sun if it were used to do this one day?
| Probably. It's field of view is smaller but it can image
| features down to the high single km scale (~8km) on the
| photosphere.
|
| The problem with this is that at 10km scale the features of the
| sun are changing far faster than at large scales. The rows of
| exposures' tops and bottoms would not match very well assuming
| a normal raster scan. The higher the resolution the smaller the
| timespan you have to take the full disk image. And the higher
| the resolution the smaller your FOV is. It's a rough situation.
| mmooss wrote:
| Why? How would knowledge benefit, either directly or
| indirectly?
|
| I sometimes wonder if we should have probes orbiting each
| planet and the sun, with the most generically useful sensors,
| for research that isn't planned decades in advance. But I
| really don't know if that would be a good investment of scarce
| scientific resources.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Link to the raw image files (9600x9600, about 10-20 MB each):
|
| Visible: https://eopro.esa.int/wp-
| content/uploads/2024/10/PHI_Visible...
|
| Magnetogram: https://eopro.esa.int/wp-
| content/uploads/2024/10/PHI_Magneto...
|
| Velocity map: https://eopro.esa.int/wp-
| content/uploads/2024/10/PHI_Velocit...
|
| Ultraviolet: https://eopro.esa.int/wp-
| content/uploads/2024/10/EUI_Ultravi...
| djsavvy wrote:
| Why does the border of the sun look so poorly antialiased in
| all of these? Are they doing some sort of postprocessing that
| would cause that?
| griomnib wrote:
| Just the guts of the simulation showing through at higher
| resolutions.
| elyobo wrote:
| I assumed it was the result of the "bubbling" that they
| describe in the video that also accounts for the grainy
| appearance of the surface; presumably the bubbling would be
| visible like this side on?
| MaxGripe wrote:
| Cool. BTW, the sun shines white, not yellow.
| dmitshur wrote:
| Have people wondered about a possibility of an advanced life form
| hiding inside a star? It doesn't seem easy, but there'd be an
| abundance of energy, and the less advanced life forms are
| unlikely to interfere.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| An inverse Dyson sphere, clever...
| va1a wrote:
| The Knights of the Sun
| AlphaEsponjosus wrote:
| You mean... like seriously?
| hydrolox wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_origination_beyond_planet...
| zeven7 wrote:
| I found the part about the possibility of life on neutron
| stars to be fascinating.
| dryrun wrote:
| The Saga of the seven suns has beings living in suns. Unsure
| how far they go with the idea,I'm missing 3 of the 7 books
| neom wrote:
| I thought it would be cool as a wallpaper so I added a bit of
| blur to it, pretty fun:
| https://photoshop.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:US:1779ee13-d89c-...
| ano-ther wrote:
| How do they picture the magnetic field from far away like this? I
| would have thought that the probe can only sense the local field.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| I just found these videos by the Solar Orbiter, insane:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L00J3hZCdFs
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(page generated 2024-11-23 23:00 UTC)