Highest-resolution images ever captured of the sun’s surface

[zamadatix]

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...

[exodust]

Thanks for the hi-res images.

I couldn't resist blending the visible with ultraviolet in Photoshop, here's the result: https://imgur.com/a/vRGav2d

I did a quick clean up of the hard edges, but didn't want to push pixels too much.

[ra120271]

Here is the link to the full directory contents of uploaded images; including hi-res ~99MB versions.

https://eopro.esa.int/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/

[limaoscarjuliet]

Downloading the big ones is so slow even over a semi-decent connection, it feels like getting certain lowres images in 1995 over a modem :-) What a blast from the past!

https://eopro.esa.int/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/PHI_Visible...

[djsavvy]

Why does the border of the sun look so poorly antialiased in all of these? Are they doing some sort of postprocessing that would cause that?

[mikae1]

I’d print and hang the ultraviolet one on my wall if it wasn't for the very rough edges. Dang.

[jeleh]

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/

[cornstalks]

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.

[sans_souse]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fr2elMpaMAAqgZN?format=jpg&name=...

[PittleyDunkin]

I have to imagine capturing an image over five days shows how static something is, not dynamic. Very confusing wording there! Great photo, though.

[IAmGraydon]

That’s beautiful, but not really a photo of the sun. It’s heavily processed and digitally modified.

[casenmgreen]

Twitter say "something went wrong", plus three dialogues consuming or obscuring something more than half the page.

[static_motion]

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.

[incognito124]

Actual zoomable images here: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Solar_...

[grues-dinner]

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.

[jmyeet]

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.

[dylan604]

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.

[itishappy]

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.

[eleveriven]

When you think about it - 43 million kilometers away, and still nearly 20kW per square meter - that’s an immense amount of power

[popol12]

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 ?

[onemoresoop]

And that is in all directions!

[KineticLensman]

> 43 million km away

er, 149 million km away [0] not 43

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun

[brcmthrowaway]

The Sun is eldritch horror. The test of being human is being fine with it.

[dmitshur]

Have people wondered about a possibility of an advanced life form hiding inside a star? It doesn't seem easy, but there'd be an abundance of energy, and the less advanced life forms are unlikely to interfere.

[hydrolox]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_origination_beyond_planet...

[fritzo]

Stanislaw Lem's short story "The Truth" https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-truth-by-stanislaw-le...

[corytheboyd]

An inverse Dyson sphere, clever…

[eleveriven]

It’s also fun to think about how hard it would be for us to detect such life forms

[dryrun]

The Saga of the seven suns has beings living in suns. Unsure how far they go with the idea,I'm missing 3 of the 7 books

[bmurphy1976]

Revelation space has got the Amarantin living has simulations inside a neutron star.

[va1a]

The Knights of the Sun

[M_bara]

Stephen Baxter’s Flux has something in that vein

[throwaway290]

Define life!

[AlphaEsponjosus]

You mean... like seriously?

[Bengalilol]

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)

[PittleyDunkin]

> 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?

[maplant]

I will be avoiding looking at them directly so I don’t hurt my eyes

[Larrikin]

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

[User23]

Displaying this would be a fun use of the Las Vegas Sphere.

[gsliepen]

"Resolution" is used very loosely here. They are very big images of the full Sun (in terms of the number of pixels), but there are also various telescopes that "zoom in" much more on a small part of the Sun, resulting in images with much higher details than the ones from this article.

[dukeofdoom]

How crazy is it that sun spots look like skin cancer, or skin cancer looks like sun spots.

[7373737373]

I just found these videos by the Solar Orbiter, insane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L00J3hZCdFs

[lumb63]

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?

[luxuryballs]

it’s wild that we have all this data but we don’t really know what any of this stuff actually is (celestial bodies overall not just the sun) only what radiations they give off that we can read and recognize, for all we know stars are the outer shell of a multidimensional being and the heat is just an effect of us not being able to ascend dimensionally in order to pass into it because it’s “above” spacetime and attempting to pass through means transcending into an eternal realm which we of course would be vaporized because our matter is in this dimension, or it could be (insert anything, we may never know!)

[LetsGetTechnicl]

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.)

[ano-ther]

How do they picture the magnetic field from far away like this? I would have thought that the probe can only sense the local field.

[_7acn]

Cool. BTW, the sun shines white, not yellow.

[eleveriven]

Sunspots and the visible dynamics around them are always so mesmerizing