Despite being the literal center of our planet’s orbit, there’s still a lot we don’t know about the Sun. So, every time that we get a closer glimpse of the central star of the solar system we call home, it’s always exciting. The latest glimpse we’ve been given comes thanks to photographer Andrew McCarthy. McCarthy, whose work we have spotlighted a few times, pointed a telescope at the Sun for five hours and captured this amazing close-up video of the Sun.
Check out this amazing video of the Sun
McCarthy shared the astonishing video over the weekend. The video offers an exceptional close-up of the Sun’s outer edge, as tendrils of solar energy weave around it. At one point he speeds up the video from 1800x speed to 3600x, giving us a great idea of just how fast those tendrils of energy move.
As I noted above, it’s not the first time that McCarthy has wowed us with his captures of the celestial heavens above. In fact, he previously used his solar telescope to capture several images of the Sun.
He then combined 150,000 images together to create a 300-megapixel photo of the Sun. It too was an astonishing look at the star our planet orbits. McCarthy shared the new video of the Sun over on his Instagram, make sure to check it out for a spectacular view of our planet’s star.
Unraveling the Sun’s mysteries
Part of what makes these videos of the Sun so amazing is the fact that photographers can even capture them at all. The Sun puts off so much heat and energy, then when pointing a telescope at it, you can risk literally melting your eyeball if you look through it. As such, it takes specially created telescopes to view the Sun in this capacity.
Despite those dangers, though, photographers like McCarthy are able to give us rare glimpses like this video of the Sun. Further, by using similar technology, space agencies like NASA are able to create spacecraft capable of touching the Sun.
The Parker Solar Probe managed to touch the outer atmosphere of the Sun last year. A feat that only helped to increase our hunger to learn more about the star our planet orbits.
This video of the Sun isn’t going to answer any of the big questions we have about it. But, it does give us a great look at the surface of the Star. As such, we can only hope that astrophotographers like McCarthy continue to deliver such stunning pieces of work.
