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A Reddit user has captivated thousands of people with a crystal-clear image of the sun, produced using a specially-designed telescope.
User ajamesmccarthy uploaded the image on Tuesday. Described as a 145 megapixel image of our sun, the image is so large that viewers can zoom in to find minuscule details on the sun's surface, which is covered in ripples of plasma.
It is important to highlight that the telescope used to produce the image was modified in order to do so. It is extremely dangerous to look directly at the sun, either with the naked eye or through a regular telescope.
Staring directly at the sun or other sources of bright light can burn exposed tissue in the eye's retina, according to the Australian Academy of Science. In addition, magnifying the sun, such as through a telescope, can even cause fires.
"[My telescope] was specially designed to do this, and despite my experience, I've still had close calls using it," wrote ajamesmccarthy. "Seriously, don't mess around with this unless you know what you're doing."
The Reddit user's careful approach paid off, and the highly-detailed image of the sun had gained more than 35,000 upvotes as of Friday morning, as well as dozens of Reddit awards gifted by users.
The shot shows two layers of the sun: the chromosphere and the corona. The chromosphere is the orange part seen in the image. Its temperature can vary between 6,700 and 14,000 degrees Fahrenheit (3,700 or 7,700 degrees Celsius).
The other layer is called the corona. This is the outermost layer of the sun, and perhaps counterintuitively it is hotter than the chromosphere—a lot hotter. The temperature in the sun's corona is roughly 900,000 degrees F (500,000 degrees C), but it can spike to upwards of 2 million degrees F, according to NASA.
The reason the corona is so much hotter than the inner layers of the sun's atmosphere is something scientists have been trying to figure out for years. It's thought that complex magnetic fields that extend high into the corona are behind the vast temperature difference since they channel the ferocious energy of the sun as heat.
Normally it would not be possible to see the sun's corona and its chromosphere in the same photo due to the huge differences in brightness between them.
To get around this, the photographer composited an earlier shot of the corona that was captured during a solar eclipse onto their image of the chromosphere.
The chromosphere image itself was created by stitching together thousands of individual photos of different portions of the sun.
Users were wowed by the image. "It's like a lost Van Gogh," wrote one viewer. "I've literally never seen any picture of the sun look this good," said another.
