Is this a solution they rolled on their own? Cause it's abysmal. I've seen Leaflet being used for gigapixel images and it's great, even if it seems unorthodox.
I'm not affiliated, but I've been seriously debating it for a long time. The photo is a composite of the sun and the sun's heliosphere from the 2017 eclipse. One of my favorite images of the Sun.
Maybe static vs. dynamic have different meanings when talking about celestial objects that are billions of years old, 864,000 miles across and a million times the size of the planet you're living on?
It's not quite a time lapse. They took 90000 images, but they will be selecting the sharpest and most interesting subset for each section of image, not just smearing them all together.
Big fan of Andrew McCarthy's work, been following him on IG for a few years now. The stuff he's able to pull off as a backyard astrophotographer is very impressive.
What a disingenuous comment. It's not a generative AI image. It's not something someone drew/painted. It's photographic data combined together.
If you want to be pedantic, every single picture ever taken with a digital camera is digitally modified. Every single image shot on film and scanned to be used on a computer is digitally modified.
Just because you can't take a photo of the sun anywhere close to this does not mean others of us cannot, and does not make their actual images of the sun not real. Using proper filters so you do not melt your equipment allows for images of the photosphere to be captured. Using the moon to filter the photosphere during an eclipse allows the corona to be seen. It's not like it's not there except during an eclipse. It's just too faint to be captured without the filter.
That's what the SRO uses a cornograph to block the photosphere at all times to be able to image the corona.
Imaging the sun is very fun and challenging, and I'd suggest you'd learn a lot from reading up on it. Whether you'd actually enjoy it is beyond the scope of this forum
Sure, but they're not just combining, they're selecting for maximal artistic effect.
> A geometrically altered image of the 2017 eclipse as an artistic element in this composition to display an otherwise invisible structure. Great care was taken to align the two atmospheric layers in a scientifically plausible way using NASA's SOHO data as a reference.
That's definitely an artifact from stitching multiple images. But I'm not sure why they would leave it that way since it's quite noticeable, but I guess there is always some debate on how much post-processing should they do on a scientific images and some people prefer closer to the raw capture even if it's not perfect.
Oh yeah, that is interesting. I would guess an artifact from the pictures. Maybe those are the lines where they joined the different pictures together into 1 picture. I would think they could do a better job than that though.
You can, somehow, view this # in the magnetic field map picture too. First I thought this was an artifact, but I highly doubt that they would leave such an amateur thing behind (and even amateurs don't get tricked into this). Besides from the visible picture and magnetic map, I don't seem to find any correlation with the other pictures.
The scale and violence of the processes that drive the Sun are really mind-blowing. 43 million km away and it's getting on for 20kW per square metre. Edit: the probe is that far from the sun.
The scale/mass of the sun is just fascinating. It takes ~500,000 years for a photon released in the fusion process to escape the core. That's just how dense the core is that a photon gets bounced around that much. The fact that the outer layer (corona up to 3,500,000°F is so much hotter than the surface(photosphere around 10000°F) that is on top of the core (around 27,000,000°F) is just another one of those weird to appreciate as well.
I think it's crazy how little impact this giant constantly exploding ball of turbulent plasma has on our day to day lives. We get consistent light and heat, and occasional auroras... and that's it? This thing has enough energy to wipe out every last trace of human existence.
Only 20kw per square meter on the surface of the sun ? How come it is so low ?
We receive about 1kw of sunlight per square meter on Earth, and earth is 149M km from the sun. From napkin math, it should rather be ~45MW/sqm on the sun to receive 1kw/sqm on Earth (surface of the sphere of radius 149M km divided by surface of the sun gives ~45000, so 1 watt from the sun becomes 1/45000 watt when it reaches the Earth)
Your calculations are incorrect. Use common sense, models, and first principles. Light point source irradiance is E = P/4πr², so inverse square law. It's 1361 W/m² at Earth's distance of 1.5e11 m. Solar Orbiter dips down to 4.2e10 m. ¼ the distance,
Total solar power output = 4 * π * (1.5e11 [m])² * 1361 [W] = 3.85e26 W/m²
At Solar Orbiter's perihelion, assuming the distance from the Sun's point center rather than the Sun's surface = TSPO / (4 * π * (4.2e10 [m])²) = 1.74e4 W/m².
^ Except for Earth's irradiance and the distances, these are theoretical rough values rather than observed ones because reality is messier than simplified models.
The real issue was that I didn't get that you were talking about Solar Orbiter, I thought you were saying that the irradiance of the sun was 20kW/m2, which seemed low to me, but I didn't even know the word "irradiance" so I didn't know what to type on Google to check it.
Thanks for your detailed calculus :)
You're grammar bikeshedding from a domain that doesn't apply to the subject matter, so find something more important to argue about because you're wrong.
Fun fact: if the Solar System had an atmosphere that stretched from the Sun to the Earth (at least) then the sound of the Sun from Earth would be ~100dB.
IIRC the Sun converts ~4.5 million tons of mass into energy every second and even then, there are objects that are trillions of times more energetic/violent. The first LIGO detection I believe converted 5 Solar masses into energy in about a second.
You just reminded me of https://spacesounds.com which I remember seeing in the very early 2000s and thinking it was awesome.
And 4.5 million tons of mass/second may be unimaginably huge, but the Sun is so big it can also do that constantly for literally billions and billions of years. And it's not even an especially big star!
Hm, the article seems to have gotten its units wrong. Normally I'd trust the article but 43 million kilometers seems to match best with its orbit I can find documentation for.
I was wrong with my initial jumping to conclusions, but on inspection I see that the underlying ESA press release [0] actually says "The images were taken when Solar Orbiter was less than 74 million kilometres from the Sun". Now I'm really confused.
Is there no PNG or JPG? A lot of these space photos make nice backgrounds, but they're increasingly being displayed in weird zoomable only on a web page galleries
> The process took more than four hours, since the spacecraft had to change position for each individual photograph. In the final mosaics, the sun’s diameter is almost 8,000 pixels across.
I'm guessing this is sort of equivalent to manual supersampling rather than combining adjacent (ie visually translated to the next subsquare of the photo) viewpoints? Four hours is a pretty short time for 48 million miles of distance.
Edit: well considering orbital velocity I guess they probably just zigzag'd perpendicular to the orbital plane?
Sometimes I stand in the sun and feel it as hot as a nearby oven on my skin. Then I consider that I'm receiving about 1e-24 of its radiant energy. I don't blame our ancestors!
It's truly awe inspiring to know how inconceivably huge and far away the Sun is, yet it we can feel it's warmth, admire how it's light touches everything we see, and how it's responsible for all life on Earth. I love our star :)
We typically define the Sun to be white, but it has an interesting spectrum. White is just "all of the colors" and the Sun happens to be the object providing most of our light. In a very real sense, we try to make light bulbs "Sun colored."
This image is colored because it uses a red filter:
> The instrument collected red light with a wavelength of 617 nanometres.
One last thought, because I think it's fun. The Sun looks yellow to us on Earth because the sky is blue. Think about it.
Not colored, but filtered. At least for the specific "orange" image. The other images are since they're different types of sensors.
If you view the sun with eclipse glasses, you basically see the "orange" image just with your eyes. Add the same level of filtering to a telescope or long lens on your camera, and you can capture similar image.
The sun is emitting light at roughly the spectrum curve of a (non-ideal) black body at 5778°K [1].
The 'black body' curve is the idealized electromagnetic spectral emission curve of how every body 'glows' according to temperature. [0] The peak of the sun's emission curve is around 500nm which is a blue-green, but of course it is spread out across a broad spectrum so is closer to white, and then it is differentially scattered by the atmosphere.
But these photos have no atmospheric filtering or scattering, so, perhaps the yellow-orange hue is more related to their own filters?
I’m astounded by how plain and round the visible light images are. Why is the corona only visible in the UV images, if it is, according to the article, visible from earth?
Corona is very hot (millions of degrees) as opposed to 6000 of the Sun's surface, therefore it has higher contrast over Sun's surface if you go to shorter wavelengths. The reason corona is still visible from Earth is because it you mask the main solar disk (during the eclipse).
It might be that the surface is much brighter in visible light than the corona rather than the corona emits no visible light (as anyone who witnessed the recent total solar eclipse can attest). Since the corona is made up of rarefied high energy particles I would expect it to emit less total, but more short wavelength light.
Firstly the Sun itself rotates roughly once a month, and secondly if the probe wasn't going round the sun, it would be called the Solar Impactor, not the Solar Orbiter. Or maybe the Solar Evaporated Slag Cloud when it got close enough.
Well it could also be in the Sun’s equivalent of a geostationary orbit. If ChatGPT is not making things up this would be around 60 million km which is quite feasible.
This is great and all, but they are just snapshots in time. We need total 360 degree coverage of the sun 24/7. Stereo A and B did this great, but when Stereo B failed, it was never replaced.
Yes, full coverage is needed. And not just of the lower lattitudes from the ecliptic plane. The original Solar Orbiter proposal plan A was for a highly inclined orbit passing over the poles of the sun. But this was too expensive and instead they went with just another generic spectroscopic imager in the ecliptic plane. It was such a disappointment.
I wonder if the 4m DKIST on Earth would have higher resolution photomosaic of the sun if it were used to do this one day? Probably. It's field of view is smaller but it can image features down to the high single km scale (~8km) on the photosphere.
The problem with this is that at 10km scale the features of the sun are changing far faster than at large scales. The rows of exposures' tops and bottoms would not match very well assuming a normal raster scan. The higher the resolution the smaller the timespan you have to take the full disk image. And the higher the resolution the smaller your FOV is. It's a rough situation.
Link to the raw image files (9600x9600, about 10-20 MB each):
Visible: https://eopro.esa.int/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/PHI_Visible...
Magnetogram: https://eopro.esa.int/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/PHI_Magneto...
Velocity map: https://eopro.esa.int/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/PHI_Velocit...
Ultraviolet: https://eopro.esa.int/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/EUI_Ultravi...
Actual zoomable images here: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Solar_...
Is this a solution they rolled on their own? Cause it's abysmal. I've seen Leaflet being used for gigapixel images and it's great, even if it seems unorthodox.
They're using OpenSeadragon hosted on a codepen.
https://openseadragon.github.io/
https://codepen.io/Kimtaro88/embed/JjgLyJg/ee2ebbe7041869032...
Leaflet is actually listed at [1], I believe it's totally orthodox :-)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Image_Interopera...
OpenSeadragon, the one they're using, is also listed there. First on the list.
While it works, the resolution is underwhelming and there's no scale.
Would be great to see an earth or moon or country map outline for scale.
The Earth is...Slightly smaller, than one of the darker spots you see on the visible radiation image. The first one from the left...
not sure if its the server traffic or browser limitations but zooming and panning are quite slow and somewhat dent the awesomeness of this.
I don't experience those problems.
Best looking image ever captured of the Sun's entire surface goes to:
https://x.com/AJamesMcCarthy/status/1638648459002806272
by
Andrew McCarthy: https://www.instagram.com/cosmic_background/
Jason Guenzel: https://www.instagram.com/thevastreaches/
For anyone that wants to buy the 139 megapixel image for printing, it's $50 here: https://cosmicbackground.io/products/fusion-of-helios
I'm not affiliated, but I've been seriously debating it for a long time. The photo is a composite of the sun and the sun's heliosphere from the 2017 eclipse. One of my favorite images of the Sun.
Do you think that is original or some AI enhanced copy of the twitter img?
It’s the original. Andrew McCarthy links to it from both his Twitter and Instagram accounts. It’s his own website.
I am very tempted now
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fr2elMpaMAAqgZN?format=jpg&name=...
I have to imagine capturing an image over five days shows how static something is, not dynamic. Very confusing wording there! Great photo, though.
Maybe static vs. dynamic have different meanings when talking about celestial objects that are billions of years old, 864,000 miles across and a million times the size of the planet you're living on?
I agree! Very odd choice of words indeed. I wonder what semantics they were trying to convey.
It's not quite a time lapse. They took 90000 images, but they will be selecting the sharpest and most interesting subset for each section of image, not just smearing them all together.
Big fan of Andrew McCarthy's work, been following him on IG for a few years now. The stuff he's able to pull off as a backyard astrophotographer is very impressive.
That’s beautiful, but not really a photo of the sun. It’s heavily processed and digitally modified.
It’s still a photo of the sun, even if processed. You wouldn’t see much on an unprocessed photo of the sun..
What a disingenuous comment. It's not a generative AI image. It's not something someone drew/painted. It's photographic data combined together.
If you want to be pedantic, every single picture ever taken with a digital camera is digitally modified. Every single image shot on film and scanned to be used on a computer is digitally modified.
Just because you can't take a photo of the sun anywhere close to this does not mean others of us cannot, and does not make their actual images of the sun not real. Using proper filters so you do not melt your equipment allows for images of the photosphere to be captured. Using the moon to filter the photosphere during an eclipse allows the corona to be seen. It's not like it's not there except during an eclipse. It's just too faint to be captured without the filter.
That's what the SRO uses a cornograph to block the photosphere at all times to be able to image the corona.
Imaging the sun is very fun and challenging, and I'd suggest you'd learn a lot from reading up on it. Whether you'd actually enjoy it is beyond the scope of this forum
Sure, but they're not just combining, they're selecting for maximal artistic effect.
> A geometrically altered image of the 2017 eclipse as an artistic element in this composition to display an otherwise invisible structure. Great care was taken to align the two atmospheric layers in a scientifically plausible way using NASA's SOHO data as a reference.
https://cosmicbackground.io/products/fusion-of-helios
I mean, take a look at some of the photographers other work...
https://cosmicbackground.io/products/tales-from-the-solar-sy...
Okay and?
Twitter say "something went wrong", plus three dialogues consuming or obscuring something more than half the page.
I am puzzled by the « sun in visible light » picture: what is this # in the middle of it? (Physical phenomenom, or artifact from the pictures)
That's definitely an artifact from stitching multiple images. But I'm not sure why they would leave it that way since it's quite noticeable, but I guess there is always some debate on how much post-processing should they do on a scientific images and some people prefer closer to the raw capture even if it's not perfect.
Oh yeah, that is interesting. I would guess an artifact from the pictures. Maybe those are the lines where they joined the different pictures together into 1 picture. I would think they could do a better job than that though.
You can, somehow, view this # in the magnetic field map picture too. First I thought this was an artifact, but I highly doubt that they would leave such an amateur thing behind (and even amateurs don't get tricked into this). Besides from the visible picture and magnetic map, I don't seem to find any correlation with the other pictures.
I will be avoiding looking at them directly so I don’t hurt my eyes
The scale and violence of the processes that drive the Sun are really mind-blowing. 43 million km away and it's getting on for 20kW per square metre. Edit: the probe is that far from the sun.
The scale/mass of the sun is just fascinating. It takes ~500,000 years for a photon released in the fusion process to escape the core. That's just how dense the core is that a photon gets bounced around that much. The fact that the outer layer (corona up to 3,500,000°F is so much hotter than the surface(photosphere around 10000°F) that is on top of the core (around 27,000,000°F) is just another one of those weird to appreciate as well.
I think it's crazy how little impact this giant constantly exploding ball of turbulent plasma has on our day to day lives. We get consistent light and heat, and occasional auroras... and that's it? This thing has enough energy to wipe out every last trace of human existence.
Only 20kw per square meter on the surface of the sun ? How come it is so low ?
We receive about 1kw of sunlight per square meter on Earth, and earth is 149M km from the sun. From napkin math, it should rather be ~45MW/sqm on the sun to receive 1kw/sqm on Earth (surface of the sphere of radius 149M km divided by surface of the sun gives ~45000, so 1 watt from the sun becomes 1/45000 watt when it reaches the Earth)
Where am I wrong ?
Because that's the irradiance at the Solar Orbiter's closest approach (well, more like 17.5kW, hence getting on for).
It's pretty amazing that you can have a spacecraft in nearly 20x direct sunlight, permanently and still have it actually work.
Your calculations are incorrect. Use common sense, models, and first principles. Light point source irradiance is E = P/4πr², so inverse square law. It's 1361 W/m² at Earth's distance of 1.5e11 m. Solar Orbiter dips down to 4.2e10 m. ¼ the distance,
Total solar power output = 4 * π * (1.5e11 [m])² * 1361 [W] = 3.85e26 W/m²
Sun's "surface" irradiance = TSPO / (4 * π * (6.96e8 [m])²) = 6.32e9 W/m²
At Solar Orbiter's perihelion, assuming the distance from the Sun's point center rather than the Sun's surface = TSPO / (4 * π * (4.2e10 [m])²) = 1.74e4 W/m².
^ Except for Earth's irradiance and the distances, these are theoretical rough values rather than observed ones because reality is messier than simplified models.
The real issue was that I didn't get that you were talking about Solar Orbiter, I thought you were saying that the irradiance of the sun was 20kW/m2, which seemed low to me, but I didn't even know the word "irradiance" so I didn't know what to type on Google to check it. Thanks for your detailed calculus :)
It's basic algebra. Calculus would involve derivatives or integrals.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/calculus
The usual sense involves integration and derivation but look at senses 2 & 4. It also means any calculation.
You're grammar bikeshedding from a domain that doesn't apply to the subject matter, so find something more important to argue about because you're wrong.
1) be nice
2) referring to a calculation or the reasoning of something as "the calculus" is a common everyday usage
And that is in all directions!
Fun fact: if the Solar System had an atmosphere that stretched from the Sun to the Earth (at least) then the sound of the Sun from Earth would be ~100dB.
IIRC the Sun converts ~4.5 million tons of mass into energy every second and even then, there are objects that are trillions of times more energetic/violent. The first LIGO detection I believe converted 5 Solar masses into energy in about a second.
One of the detections was of a merger that momentarily had a higher power output than the entire rest of the visible universe combined.
You just reminded me of https://spacesounds.com which I remember seeing in the very early 2000s and thinking it was awesome.
And 4.5 million tons of mass/second may be unimaginably huge, but the Sun is so big it can also do that constantly for literally billions and billions of years. And it's not even an especially big star!
> 43 million km away
er, 149 million km away [0] not 43
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun
The Solar Orbiter is 43 million km away from the Sun at its closest.
If we got 17.5ish kW per square metre here on Earth, you'd know about it (but only briefly).
Hm, the article seems to have gotten its units wrong. Normally I'd trust the article but 43 million kilometers seems to match best with its orbit I can find documentation for.
I was wrong with my initial jumping to conclusions, but on inspection I see that the underlying ESA press release [0] actually says "The images were taken when Solar Orbiter was less than 74 million kilometres from the Sun". Now I'm really confused.
[0] https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Solar_...
Well, they’re _technically_ correct.
Oops, my bad
Cool. BTW, the sun shines white, not yellow.
Is there no PNG or JPG? A lot of these space photos make nice backgrounds, but they're increasingly being displayed in weird zoomable only on a web page galleries
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/11/PHI_s_view...
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/11/PHI_s_map_...
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/11/PHI_s_velo...
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/11/EUI_s_view...
> The process took more than four hours, since the spacecraft had to change position for each individual photograph. In the final mosaics, the sun’s diameter is almost 8,000 pixels across.
I'm guessing this is sort of equivalent to manual supersampling rather than combining adjacent (ie visually translated to the next subsquare of the photo) viewpoints? Four hours is a pretty short time for 48 million miles of distance.
Edit: well considering orbital velocity I guess they probably just zigzag'd perpendicular to the orbital plane?
Every time I learn something new about the Sun or see photos like this it makes sense we used to worship it (and maybe we should bring that back.)
Sometimes I stand in the sun and feel it as hot as a nearby oven on my skin. Then I consider that I'm receiving about 1e-24 of its radiant energy. I don't blame our ancestors!
It's truly awe inspiring to know how inconceivably huge and far away the Sun is, yet it we can feel it's warmth, admire how it's light touches everything we see, and how it's responsible for all life on Earth. I love our star :)
Displaying this would be a fun use of the Las Vegas Sphere.
I thought Sol was basically white? very yellow/orange in the left-most image.
We typically define the Sun to be white, but it has an interesting spectrum. White is just "all of the colors" and the Sun happens to be the object providing most of our light. In a very real sense, we try to make light bulbs "Sun colored."
This image is colored because it uses a red filter:
> The instrument collected red light with a wavelength of 617 nanometres.
One last thought, because I think it's fun. The Sun looks yellow to us on Earth because the sky is blue. Think about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_illuminant
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-B97804431878650...
No, Sol does not output equally across the spectrum. I'm assuming this is artificially colored on some level, though.
Not colored, but filtered. At least for the specific "orange" image. The other images are since they're different types of sensors.
If you view the sun with eclipse glasses, you basically see the "orange" image just with your eyes. Add the same level of filtering to a telescope or long lens on your camera, and you can capture similar image.
Well, it sure does look white if you form its image on a white piece of paper, so I think it's pretty fair to call it white.
Indeed, good qstn.
The sun is emitting light at roughly the spectrum curve of a (non-ideal) black body at 5778°K [1].
The 'black body' curve is the idealized electromagnetic spectral emission curve of how every body 'glows' according to temperature. [0] The peak of the sun's emission curve is around 500nm which is a blue-green, but of course it is spread out across a broad spectrum so is closer to white, and then it is differentially scattered by the atmosphere.
But these photos have no atmospheric filtering or scattering, so, perhaps the yellow-orange hue is more related to their own filters?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation
[1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/130209/how-can-i...
I’m astounded by how plain and round the visible light images are. Why is the corona only visible in the UV images, if it is, according to the article, visible from earth?
Corona is very hot (millions of degrees) as opposed to 6000 of the Sun's surface, therefore it has higher contrast over Sun's surface if you go to shorter wavelengths. The reason corona is still visible from Earth is because it you mask the main solar disk (during the eclipse).
It might be that the surface is much brighter in visible light than the corona rather than the corona emits no visible light (as anyone who witnessed the recent total solar eclipse can attest). Since the corona is made up of rarefied high energy particles I would expect it to emit less total, but more short wavelength light.
How crazy is it that sun spots look like skin cancer, or skin cancer looks like sun spots.
> Highest-resolution images ever captured of the sun’s entire surface
Did the probe revolves around sun ?
Firstly the Sun itself rotates roughly once a month, and secondly if the probe wasn't going round the sun, it would be called the Solar Impactor, not the Solar Orbiter. Or maybe the Solar Evaporated Slag Cloud when it got close enough.
Well it could also be in the Sun’s equivalent of a geostationary orbit. If ChatGPT is not making things up this would be around 60 million km which is quite feasible.
I just wanted to say I appreciate every single one of your comments on this thread but this one even more so
https://googlethatforyou.com?q=Solar%20Orbiter
This is great and all, but they are just snapshots in time. We need total 360 degree coverage of the sun 24/7. Stereo A and B did this great, but when Stereo B failed, it was never replaced.
Yes, full coverage is needed. And not just of the lower lattitudes from the ecliptic plane. The original Solar Orbiter proposal plan A was for a highly inclined orbit passing over the poles of the sun. But this was too expensive and instead they went with just another generic spectroscopic imager in the ecliptic plane. It was such a disappointment.
I wonder if the 4m DKIST on Earth would have higher resolution photomosaic of the sun if it were used to do this one day? Probably. It's field of view is smaller but it can image features down to the high single km scale (~8km) on the photosphere.
The problem with this is that at 10km scale the features of the sun are changing far faster than at large scales. The rows of exposures' tops and bottoms would not match very well assuming a normal raster scan. The higher the resolution the smaller the timespan you have to take the full disk image. And the higher the resolution the smaller your FOV is. It's a rough situation.
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