Plasma falling to the surface of the sun.
Another cloud free day in Scotland let me catch almost 9 hours of this huge and lively prom. Taken with my home made 90mm modded Coronado PST and DMK21 camera. Software: CdC, Eqmod, DSSR, AutoStakkert!, Wavesharp, DVS, Shotcut and Gimp.
David Wilson on April 8, 2025 @ Inverness, Scotland
https://spaceweathergallery2.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=221951
The "earth to scale" really boggles my mind 🫨
Thank you, I didn't even see that.
Needs banana
It's there, you just gotta zoom in a bit.
There is banana on the Earth
it really puts things in perspective...
Looks like the video is about 20 minutes of real time per 1 second of video. There are dops of plasma that fall further than the diameter of Earth in less than one in video second... which means the plasma is falling the more than the diameter of Earth in less than 20 minutes. That's close to 100,000 mph or 160,000 kph. Dang
About 0.01% of the speed of light. I got a Lorentz factor of 1.00000001 so not quite fast enough for relativistic stuff.
The description states it was ~9h of video
Description says the poster caught 9h of video, but based on the clock watermark in the top left, what is shown is about 7.5h of video (maybe cut for the interesting bits/highest quality) from 0830ish to 1600ish) at a rate of roughly 20 minutes of real time per 1 second video time, as the original commenter pointed out
God damned KDE devs at it again /s
All that energy and here we are burning oil like cavemen in the dark.
Caveman didn't burn oil 🤓
They might have soaked fabric or some other material in animal fat (which is just oil that's solid at room temperature), wrapped it around the end of a stick, and lit it on fire. 🤓🤓
checkmate communists
And, if they did, it probably wouldn't be dark anymore.
Well I can't ram the sun up the ass of my Silverado. Although if I outlive that thing, I'm replacing it with a horse or something. New vehicles freak me out man.
Come on tell tech daddy where you go on weekdays & weekends for how long at what speed with how many passengers!
You know any efficient way to harness that energy?
This image is cool as fuck. No! Wait. This image is hot as fuck.
It's both!
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
So dumb question, but what’s causing the gap between the plasma cloud(?) and the surface? And is that gap filled with something that is invisible?
Plasma is electrically charged, so it interacts with magnetic lines.
The sun has magnetic field lines just as the earth does. It also rotates. But- since it's not solid, it doesn't have to rotate all at the same speed. The plasma in fast-rotating regions drags the field lines further than the plasma in slow rotating areas, creating weird loops, breaks and reconnections in the field lines. I'm almost certain that what we're seeing in this lovely bit of photography is a cloud of plasma travelling across, or trapped by one of those rogue field lines which has been pushed upwards from the surface by differential rotation.
It's crazy this guy is just doing this on his own. Looks like something from NASA to me.
Absolutely amazing that you could capture that with “amateur” equipment, although it is clear from your post that a lot went into this. Bravo!
For comparison the distance from the plasma cloud to the sun's surface is about how far communication satellites in geostationary orbit are above Earth.
I know all kinds of nerdy things.
fuckin love the fediverse
Another cloud free day in Scotland let me catch almost 9 hours of this huge and lively prom.
As soon as I read the word "Scotland", my brain went back and revised this to be read in Scott Manley's voice.
Thanks, now mine did too
If the earth to scale is accurate, the drops coming to the surface might be approximately close to the land mass of a large continent.
Space is fuckin big man
Is this the actual image your camera sees? Or is it more like heat sensors visualized, or something like that?
"actual image your camera sees" is a term that is hard to define with astrophotography, because it's kinda hard to define with regular digital photography, too.
The sensor collects raw data on its pixels, where the amount of radiation that makes it past that pixel's color filter actually excites the electrons on that particular pixel and gets processed on the image processing chip, where each pixel is assigned a color and it gets added together as larger added pixels in some image.
So what does a camera "see"? It depends on how the lenses and filters in front of that sensor are set up, and it depends on how susceptible to electrical noise that sensor is, and it depends on the configuration of how long it looks for each frame. Many of these sensors are sensitive to a wide range of light wavelengths, so the filter determines whether any particular pixel sees red, blue, or green light. Some get configured to filter out all but ultraviolet or infrared wavelengths, at which point the camera can "see" what the human eye cannot.
A long exposure can collect light over a long period of time to show even very faint light, at least in the dark.
There are all sorts of mechanical tricks at that point. Image stabilization tries to keep the beams of focused light stabilized on the sensor, and may compensate for movement with some offsetting movement, so that the pixel is collecting light from the same direction over the course of its entire exposure. Or, some people want to rotate their camera along with the celestial subject, a star or a planet they're trying to get a picture of, to compensate for the Earth's rotation over the long exposure.
And then there are computational tricks. Just as you might physically move the sensor or lens to compensate for motion, you may just process the incoming sensor data to understand that a particular subject's light will hit multiple pixels over time, and can get added together in software rather than at the sensor's own charged pixels.
So astrophotography is just an extension of normal photography's use of filtering out the wavelengths you don't want, and processing the data that hits the sensor. It's just that there needs to be a lot more thought and configuration of those filters and processing algorithms than the default that sits on a typical phone's camera app and hardware.
To add what the others said, this image is most likely taken with a special filter for taking only one specific wavelength, so color. In this case H-alpha, so excited hydrogen atoms, which is deep red. With this and additional filters for safety you can see more or less this image yourself, except it's red. I already had the opportunity to try this.
Here is a site showing daily images of the sun taken with different filters. Red is H-alpha, also shown in OP. Only with this filter you can see the protuberances. White is white, so what you would see if you could look directly without burning your eyes, or what you see with eclipse goggles. Right is another special Line, Calcium K. All of this you can look at with the right filters and a telescope and it looks similar to the images here, except the two colors are even more saturated than shown here. However, changes are on the order of minutes, so it looks more like an still image.
However, the sun and planets are pretty much the only object where images are similar to what you could see with telescope and filters. Colorful images of the moon are always heavily processed. For nebulas and galaxies its even more of a difference, they are just too dark to see more than a grey blob. For this a telescope does not help much, similar to a lens not helping to see in the dark. So nebulas and galaxies are shown at least hat they would look like, if they were brighter. But most of the time they are shown with a lot brighter colors than reality.
Not OP, but solar photography requires super dense filters so like sunglasses alter what you see from "actual" the filters also alter the image from "actual" yet this is what would "actually" be "seen" by the camera. So yes and no depending how you want to interpret "actual".
Thanks, this makes sense. I’ve heard there are some great astronomy photos where what we are seeing isn’t actually visible to the naked eye. Rather it’s invisible gases or something, and the photos are just visualizations based on assigning colors to density… I guess I was wondering if it was something like that. It sounds like it’s not.
Amazing capture! Easily one of the best I've ever seen.
We should look at the sun more. Follow me for more good advice.
I need details on how you homemade some stuff.
Thanks. That looks like some serious work, although very detailed.
That is mezmerizing. Is there any way to know how big this thing is?
See Banana Earth for scale, top left?
Totally missed that. Thx.
That thing is massive!
It’s like raiiiiiiiaaaaaiiiiiiiin…
Cool shot!
This is beautiful
Nah, that is just my girlfriend taking a shower.
What a hottie.
I'll give you $10 if you lick it.
I licked it, where's my money?
Prove it!
I bet you had to spend at least 2$ for ice cream
It could be sun birds.
How are you using Gimp with this?
I'm assuming, like the other response said, overlay graphics, but also possibly to animate it.
Probably for making the static overlay graphics, and possibly the clock hands.
looks like a creature.
What does this mean for ham radio?
So beautiful!
Yum!
i d like one a little slower , here i just blink and one hour passes.. mesmerising !
In the upper-left-hand corner there's an Earth to scale. Should give you some idea.
is this rain? Does the sun have a plasma cycle that could affect wattage that hits earth?
Look at this and tell me life couldn't evolve on the Sun, that is a stable structure with reputation patterns, this alone is enough to make Conway's game of Life
Life as we know it could not "evolve" on the sun. And technically life has to be present first before it can evolve. Evolution isn't what created life. It's just how the living change over time.
I'm pretty sure somewhere a being exists that is basically just self modifying plasma fields living inside a nova remnant
A gaseous cloud in space the size of 7 suns may have the ability to flow right past us, but also, think.
Obviously plasma beings would be nothing like us at least physically (theoretically it could have similar systems like nervous systems)
And as for life having to exist first, ehh, terms get vague at that point, are the chemicals alive? No, but when they happen to be in a certain state they are, I prefer to think of it like Rocks evolve into a planet, not the same thing as biological evolution but it's the same word and since the chemicals are the predecessor to life then they did evolve from them in that manner just no genetics involved
They were born in the early days of all things, when even space burned with white hot fire
They persisted, EM fields feeding their core the kaleidoscope soup of nameless plasma and shattered atom hearts and over strange aeons began to learn to shape the fields that fed and flew them
In time as the particle sea began to cool, they found refuge in brief stars larger than solar systems, cavorting and chasing in the balmy updrafts so hot that even helium burns
Now in this cold distant future, where stars are but unreachable cinders, they scrimp and conserve the relatively little time our sun has left to them, some two billion short years hence.
Pray for our star children, we cannot grasp even a fraction of the cosmic empire they have lost
We know it's life, I can see the souls sucking from the clouds into the inner sun.