A space photographer has captured a stunning image of a large cloud of plasma ejecting from the Sun that will be haunted for a long time. The fiery filament, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), spread out into space over a distance of 11.6 million kilometers from the sun’s surface, the photographer said.
The image was taken on September 24 by Andrew McCarthy, a professional space photographer based in Arizona. CME was part of a minor solar storm. The G-1-class storm, the lowest category on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Geomagnetic Storm Scale, was headed away from Earth, SpaceWeather.com reported.
In a statement on Reddit, McCarthy wrote that the ejected particle was “the largest CME ever witnessed”. The plasma initially took part in a large loop known as the bulge, attached to the Sun’s surface, and then ruptured and flowed into space at about 161,000 km/s, McCarthy said.
McCarthy added that the photo is a false-color composite time-lapse that gathers together hundreds of thousands of images captured over a six-hour period.
The entire captured image looks like thisBetween 30 and 80 images were captured every second and then stored in a file that peaked at around 800 gigabytes. The images were then stitched together to show the CME in stunning detail.
The Sun’s surface and CME appear orange in the photo, but that’s not its true color. The chromosphere (the lowest region of the Sun’s atmosphere) and CMEs naturally emit a type of light that appears pinkish red to us and is known as hydrogen-alpha or H-alpha light.
However, the original images were almost entirely white, as the exposure time of each image was so short. McCarthy digitally added orange while creating the final image to provide contrast between individual structures on the sun’s surface and highlight the CME. Yet, as the rest of the image is not filtered by orange, the Sun retains an eerie white halo that makes it stand out against the dark backdrop of space.
CMEs have become more frequent in recent months as the Sun enters a period of increased solar activity, known as the solar maximum, which lasts for about seven years. This gives people much more opportunities to capture similar images.
“We will see more of these as we move towards solar maximum,” McCarthy wrote. Plasma fumes are also likely to “grow progressively more,” he added.
The photographer warned people not to try to observe the Sun without proper equipment. “Don’t point a telescope at the Sun,” McCarthy says on Reddit. “You’ll fry your camera or worse, your eyes.” He also said that the telescope he used to photograph the CME was “specially modified with multiple filters” to safely observe the CME and capture images…
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