Visions of Our Local Star #17

As the humans of Earth scurry around from place to place, the Sun and Moon continue calmly about their celestial dance, as they have for billions of years. This photograph of October's partial solar eclipse was taken at 10:10 am from the UK. It shows the Sun approximately 2 minutes after 'first contact', when the Moon is just starting to make an appearance. The Sun looks as though it has had a tiny bite taken out of the top. The narrowband hydrogen-alpha filter used to take this image enables us to peer into the chromosphere, the lower region of the solar atmosphere. At this wavelength we can see many of the Sun's most interesting phenomena, including sunspots, prominences and filaments....View all