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Saturday, 08 April 2023 10:00 PM
Astrophotographers Andrew McCarthy and Jason Genzel collaborated to create the image of the fiery surface of the sunThe duo collected nearly 90,000 images of the sun to compose the image, which they call “Fusion of Helios”, which displays the normally invisible solar corona, the outermost layer that tends to be hidden by the sun’s strong glare.
According to RT, McCarthy told Live Science: “We wanted to push astrophotography as far as possible in terms of science and art in it by creating a super-resolution image of our star in a way that breaks the traditional rules of astrophotography. We wanted to create a complete mosaic of the sun.” .
One of the challenges was to obtain images of both the corona, the outer part of the sun’s atmosphere, and the chromosphere, which is a thin layer of plasma between the corona and the visible surface of the sun (the photosphere). These parts of the sun can only be seen under certain conditions.
McCarthy explained: “We use multiple layers of the sun’s atmosphere that cannot usually be photographed at the same time, and the reason is the relative brightness of the sun. The corona is only really visible if the sun is completely obscured, as it happens during an eclipse.”
With the help of computer software, the two photographers “stitched the images together like a quilt” to make the final image, according to McCarthy’s Instagram post announcing the final image.
The mosaic includes thousands of “spikes”, which are smooth-looking jets of plasma, as well as a huge hurricane of plasma regarding 14 Earths high, according to McCarthy.
To make the image, McCarthy and Genzel used their own images, including one taken by Genzel during the 2017 total solar eclipse, as well as data from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, a spacecraft launched by NASA in 1995 in collaboration with the European Space Agency. .
