Our Presto-Chango Multiwavelength Sun

Steele Hill, NASA Goddard’s salesman of all things solar, just posted his latest weekly release of imagery, courtesy of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Steele creates the still images and video snippets for use in science museums and other public places. Here is his descriptive text for the image and video in this post.

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory’s images of this Sun (Dec. 7, 2011) taken at almost the same time in several wavelengths at different temperatures and layers of the Sun. In addition, we superimposed an illustration of the Sun’s magnetic field lines to the view. We start off looking at the 6,000 degrees C. photosphere that shows the various sunspots on the “surface” of the Sun. Then, we transition into the region between the chromosphere and the corona, at about 1 million degrees C. where, in extreme UV light, the active regions appear lighter. We phase in a composite of three different wavelengths showing temperatures up to 2 million degrees C. To top it off, we overlay a science-based estimation of the complex magnetic field lines (partly made visible in the first UV image) extending from and connecting the active regions before going back to the sunspot image. Who ...