A brilliant American amateur astronomer delivers a stunning 140 megapixel image of the Sun. The details of our currently very active star are breathtaking.
Andrew McCarthy is an American amateur astronomer who delights us year-round on social media with his photos of the cosmos, taken in his “backyard” in Arizona under clear and dark skies. You can admire breathtaking details of the moon, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, nebulae, etc. His photos are always breathtaking.
And he doesn’t just photograph the sky at night. During the day he also happens to be staring at the Sun with proper gear (never stare directly at the Sun without proper protection) to capture the beauty and activity of the brightest star visible from Earth.
A huge plasma tornado
If he is very interested in the sun at the moment, that is no coincidence either: it is very restless and vibrates with a high level of activity that we are connected to, such as when a solar storm hits the earth’s magnetic field and ignites the sky with it northern lights. And the sun has been a great spectacle for photographers over the past few weeks, as evidenced in this new shot by Andrew McCarthy.
“A mix of art and science,” he wrote in the tweet, which reveals his gorgeous composite photo of the sun. It’s a job that took him 5 days with a friend: “This photo combines more than 90,000 images that have been meticulously overlaid and edited to reveal our star in a way you’ve never seen it before”. One of the “details” that catches your eye first is this red line sticking out of the star at the top right. It’s a giant plasma tornado 14 times the height of Earth. An animation zooming in on this shows us the twisting of the column.
Kudos to her and her incredible work. It’s a hypnotic masterpiece where you can also make out the soft filaments of the solar wind escaping the Sun in its corona and others that seem to crawl across its surface like snakes.