Andrew McCarthy, an astronomer, has posted multiple photographs of what he claims is the finest detailed image of the sun he has ever captured.
The Independent wrote that the photographer, who goes by the handle @cosmic-background on Instagram, revealed that he stitched together 1, 50,000 individual photographs of the sun to create the current image, which features beautiful details of the solar surface. The finished image is 300 megapixels in size, which is 60 times the size of conventional five-megapixel camera phone photographs. It was captured using a novel photographic approach.
Despite its great resolution, the shot isn’t completely correct. The dark spots on the Sun are high-intensity areas that are dazzling white in reality; however, the photographic process inverts the colors, giving them a black appearance.
McCarthy captured the image with a modified telescope with two filters, both to prevent the telescope from igniting and to protect himself from blindness when looking at the Sun.
The photograph depicts the star in incredible detail. The entire surface of the Sun is covered in flaming swirls, which are fusillades of nuclear fusion reactions. There are apparent black patches that are inverted to indicate very bright locations on the surface in one of McCarthy’s photos, and there are even visible solar flares splashing away from it.
The Sun seems to the naked eye to be a simple golden point in the sky emitting life-giving sunshine. McCarthy’s photographs, on the other hand, provide spectators a fresh viewpoint on the star. The Sun is depicted as a rich, hot swirling ball of light and heat, which appears much more threatening when viewed from a closer distance.
Earlier in Jan 2020, the first snapshot and movie of the sun were captured by a new solar telescope in Hawaii. The images are the highest-resolution views of our star ever taken, revealing details on the sun’s surface as small as 18 kilometres across.