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There’s a town in New Mexico called Sunspot, and it’s home to one sweet piece of optical hardware: the National Science Foundation’s Dunn Solar Telescope. Last month it snapped this gorgeous photo of a sunspot, which is an area that is relatively cool and dim on the sun’s surface, but bristling with magnetic activity. This particular sunspot was more than three times wider than the Earth.
This level of clarity was achieved using the Dunn’s freshly installed advanced adaptive optics image correction system and a new high-resolution digital camera. Usually Earth’s writhing atmosphere causes too much distortion for ground-based telescopes to capture so much detail, but the Dunn compensates for this with a spiffy deformable mirror that changes its shape 130 times per second to maintain optimal focus. It also uses a system where it takes a large number of images in quick succession, almost 30 per second for several seconds, then uses sophisticated software to combine all of the best parts from all of the images into one high-clarity finished product.
National Solar Observatory article
Wikipedia article on sunspots
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It’s incredible how organic the sun looks close up. It looks like some sort of plant. What are all those grooves?
I believe the filaments are areas of magnetic flux channeling plasma across areas of different temperature.
I use believe to indicate that I read it in a few textbooks and am not quite 100% sure of the answer due to the passage of time, but I know it’s gosh-darned close if it’s not dead-on.
Mez said: “It’s incredible how organic the sun looks close up. It looks like some sort of plant. What are all those grooves?”
Yes it does look organic. My first thought was a sunflower, but then,I also think it looks like the iris and pupil of an eye. I read the article link and wonder if there are other photos from this telescope, of other objects?
Drakvil said: “I believe the filaments are,… but I know it’s gosh-darned close if it’s not dead-on.”
LOL.
hey..
man the sun looks so freakin awesome that close… wonder how they got that picture
Ummm… read the article?
Oh, snap.
Anyway, looks beautifully like the mouth of a sea anemone. I can’t believe that’s 3 earths-wide. That’s awesome.
Yeah, one of those grooves is like a giant river of energy.
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Astrophysists have proof that people and earth are black hole (supernova) star dust.
MEET YOUR MAKER! (image above is similar being that it is a star)
200 years ago I would be executed for stating the above. Thanks to George Washington (call me Mr. president not king)
Ninth!!!
I read an article somewhat recently about how the sun has been losing its sunspots.