Categories: Astrophotossun

4 Cool Views of the Hot, Loopy, Spotty Sun

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).

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Many of these loops could fit several Earths inside of them.

Different views from different filters from John Chumack:

The Sun in H-Alpha, on 01-07-2013, using a Lunt Solar LS60Scope/LS50 Hydrogen Alpha Solar filter. Credit: John Chumack

The Sun on 1/07/13 as seen using a White Light Glass filter. Credit: John Chumack

See more of John’s work at his website, Galactic Images, or his Flickr page.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/