mckitterick: (palomar telescope)
mckitterick ([personal profile] mckitterick) wrote2010-08-27 02:21 pm
Entry tags:

Astro-Porn of the Day: The Eye Is Ever Watchful

The New Solar Telescope captures the Eye of Sauron!

Well, actually, this is a first light adaptive optics image from the NST at the Big Bear Solar Observatory in California. "With a 1.6-meter primary mirror, the NST is the largest solar telescope in the world," says observatory staff Nicolas Gorceix. "It has realtime correction for atmospheric distortion [aka "adaptive optics"], so we can see things in very high resolution - as small as 65 km wide on the Sun. For perspective, Earth is slightly smaller than the whole sunspot including the dark umbra and the daisy petal-like penumbra. The spot is surrounded by the Sun's ubiquitous granular field," which shows the boiling surface of the Sun.

Check it out:


Click the image to see the story.

Welcome back, sunspots!

Chris

Post a comment in response:

If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting