Hybrid Eclipse View
I first discovered this on today’s APOD, and felt compelled to repost it here after reading about it further on the SOHO website. Feast your eyes upon this fantastic composite view of Wednesday’s total solar eclipse:
Credits: Jay M. Pasachoff and the Williams College Eclipse Expedition, from Kastellorizo, Greece and SOHO, NASA/ESA.
A merger of a space image from the NASA/ESA SOHO spacecraft and an image taken from Kastellorizo, Greece, by the Williams College Eclipse Expedition (from Williamstown, Massachusetts). Though SOHO can observe the solar corona on the face of the Sun and can observe the outer part of the solar corona, the “doughnut” between those images is not visible from Earth except during total solar eclipses. The Williams expedition is supported by grants from NSF, NASA, and National Geographic. The central image from SOHO shows the Sun’s disk at temperatures around 60,000 - 80,000 K. The outer image from SOHO shows gas at the millions of degrees typical of the sun’s corona. Merging the eclipse image with the space image from SOHO allows astronomers to trace features in the corona from their bases on the Sun’s surface up until the gas escapes into interplanetary space; some of this gas winds up hitting our Earth’s upper atmosphere.
The image combines an Earthbound image of the eclipse from Greece with imagery from SOHO’s EIT 304 and LASCO C2 instruments. Magnificent.
11 Responses to “Hybrid Eclipse View”
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Oh, I read that page yesterday…I’m pretty hip with the sun.
Oddly, I find that many people don’t link to SOHO, maybe because it has more “technical” images, but I’ve been a fan for some time. Spaceweather’s gallery is quite nice, too, of homegrown images.
OK, I thought I’d wait for some birthday money, because I might have to get another crown on my tooth, but I think I’ll buy the PST after all. It’s only $500, which isn’t a big deal considering it’s nearly a couple of grocery store trips. I just won’t eat.
Seriously, thanks for not suggesting I buy it or not buy it…better that the desire comes unfettered by others’ opinions. [can’t find the right keyboard expression]
Watch it be another nice evening tomorrow…I have to go somewhere. Argh.
Cheers.
That was freaky! Everything faded to black. The page looked different. I like things the way they are. That was Darth Vaderish.
Heh, sorry. You caught me experimenting with a couple of new layout ideas.
I’ve been fending off my PST urge for quite a while now. Of course, I just discovered they’ve introduced another model in CaK (drool). Not sure how much longer I’ll be able to hold out… but for the time being my sights are set on additional camera lenses first. So many toys, so little time…
Ya, but the Cak says it’s more for astrophotography, which is not my primary concern. I read all the info on their site, and it seems the PST would be fine for me. I’m holding out for a digicam, because I think my brother-in-law will give me his for my birthday, and it has video and all–it wasn’t a cheap camera. He’s so into the newest gadgets. (The GPS in the car annoyed me though.)
I would like a decent, not-so-expensive telescope for our Florida home. It’s only 12 minutes to the beach and last summer there were some great nights. I don’t need one here, but I would definitely use it there, and I can’t cart it back and forth on the plane. There’s some radio station where a guy from some school gives astro reports of what’s in the sky that night. I stumbled upon it one night driving along. That’s cool…as you’re driving around he’s telling you what to look for. I’m bummed though, I just found out that they put down the convertible. Argh. It’s nice seeing moon halos as one is whizzing along the dark parts of A1A. I have some interesting memories in that car…Southhampton at night on the beach…LOTS of stars…oh well.
I have messy notes about other people’s telescopes I looked through–I have “90mm refractor Meade DS” scribbled down, which I liked the best–at least of what I looked at. Weird, I did a search and came across one of my posts from last year, lol. Ok…no need to worry about the messy notes. I wasted five months this year.
Is there an observatory anywhere close to you? I’ve never been to McDonald, which is pretty pathetic.
(I need to quit coffee–it isn’t helping insomnia, lol)
Are you going to change the design of this page? I really like it the way it is (except for the little red dots
)
really never seen before such a image, but I have question that why the black oval is larger than the sun? this is interesting image taken, really awesome.
sunil
Sunil, the black & white area around the Sun in the composite image is taken from a photo of the Sun’s corona as seen from Earth, when the eclipse was in totality — and just like we’d be able to see with our eyes. What they’ve done in the photo is add that to pictures of the solar disk itself taken in an ultraviolet wavelength (which isn’t visible to the naked eye) as well as the solar emissions (in the reddish, exterior part of the frame) from the time of the eclipse. It’s a really neat composite — you can trace the lines extending from the Sun out to millions of miles (remember that the Sun is about 1,400,000 km in diameter, so that outer portion from the LASCO C2 instrument extends a long ways). It’s not quite all to scale, but it sure looks neat.
This image taken (from southern Turkey) by Nick King is the best I’ve seen from the event. That might help add some perspective. You can view many more beautiful photos at the SpaceWeather gallery.
sunil,
there are two images laid on top of each other.
The outside one is of the solar eclipse, so the black circle is the moon eclipsing the sun.
Inside the circle of the moon, they have placed a picture of the sun from space, to show the comparison of the corona.
I hope that clears it up.
It’s an amazing image, very cool.
damn, wolverine beat me to it..
Heh, sorry AitchJay.
Solar Flare:
I’ve never looked through a CaK scope, so I’m not sure if you have to similarly “train your eyes” (so to speak) for observing like Hydrogen alpha. One thing it’s handy for though is being able to see things developing closer to the surface. I guess it’d be somewhat of a luxury — I’m really after one of the SolarMax scopes, not only for observing but solar imaging (something I’d love to do on a regular basis, and log sunspots & prominences).
I think the closest observatory to me is down at the University of Texas (the name escapes me); I’ve never tried going down there just because the public has really limited access to it, and it’s right in the heart of downtown — my backyard has much better conditions despite my lesser aperture.
As for the site design: I would like to do a major overhaul at some point; the snippet you saw of a modified theme last night looks a lot cleaner and less template-ish than this modified Kubrick-style WordPress theme that everyone and their brother runs. I’d have to do some major modifications to that one in order to get it to do what I want.
For now, I settled for tweaking a few things around and doing a font revision.