The Sun in H-Alpha on 01-07-2013, as seen with a Lunt Solar LS60Scope/LS50, and Hydrogen Alpha Solar filter. Credit: John Chumack
A few sunspots are now ‘peppering” the surface of our Sun — Spaceweather.com lists about 12 different sunspot groups today. Yesterday (January 7, 2013), astrophotographer John Chumack stepped outside over his lunch break and captured some cool-looking views of the Sun from his observatory in Ohio, using different filters.
See more below, plus the Solar Dynamics Observatory has a spectacular video of coronal loops on the Sun during January 5 through 7.
The video shows the 171 angstroms channel, which is especially good at showing coronal loops – the arcs extending off of the Sun where plasma moves along the magnetic field lines, said the SDO team. The brightest spots seen here are locations where the magnetic field near the surface is exceptionally strong. The characteristic temperature here is 1 million K (or 1.8 million F).
Many of these loops could fit several Earths inside of them.
Different views from different filters from John Chumack:
See more of John’s work at his website, Galactic Images, or his Flickr page.
Humanity will eventually need somewhere to live on the Moon. While aesthetics might not be…
How can a geologic map of a lunar impact crater created billions of years ago…
We have the transit method to thank for the large majority of the exoplanets we've…
During the 1970s, while probing distant galaxies to determine their mass, size, and other characteristics,…
Locomotion makes things move, and certain forms of locomotion make them move better than others.…
The JWST was never intended to find asteroids. It was built to probe some of…