03:58 PM
Sunday 09 April 2023
LiveScience published an unprecedented image of the flaming surface of the Sun, co-produced by astronomical photographers Andrew McCarthy and Jason Genzel.
The two photographers resorted to merging regarding 90,000 images of the sun to form the image they call “Fusion of Helios”, in which the invisible solar corona appears, which is the outer layer that tends to disappear due to the strong glare of the sun.
“We wanted to push astrophotography as far as science and art can go by creating a super-resolution image of our star in a way that breaks the traditional rules of astrophotography,” McCarthy told Live Science. “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.
With the help of computer software, the two photographers stitched the images together to produce the final image.
Thousands of thorns appear in the image of the sun, which are smooth-looking plasma jets, in addition to a huge hurricane of plasma with a huge height equivalent to the Earth’s diameter 14 times, according to McCarthy.
