Ever-burning art of science

by Malgorzata Stankiewicz

Images courtesy of Nasa and AP

Just when you thought that images taken above the safe-flight zone wouldn’t possibly depict anything other than a dense cloud of air-travel misery, aka the Eyjafjallajokull ash, and that the Sun couldn’t surprise you with anything else but a mind-numbingly atrocious front-page image on Election Day, Nasa has released pictures so spectacular that many would be forgiven for thinking they were taken with the iPhone’s phenomenal Hipstamatic app.

Close, but no cigar. Taken with a slightly more sophisticated apparatus, a £548 million Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) to be specific, these astounding, super-fine resolution images show the sun and its activity like never before.

Unveiled by Nasa in April, photographs illustrating loops of glittering solar flares surrounding the sun’s surface and tiny black sunspots visible against the bright, tangerine-coloured one-million degrees star were among the first few sent to Earth by SDO.

Some of the images, like this breathtaking, extreme ultraviolet teal blue, green and golden picture capturing an escaping loop of plasma superheated to nearly around 60,000 degrees celsius have been colour manipulated, in order to distinguish the varying temperature of the sun.

“It's like looking at the details of our star through a microscope,” said co-investigator Richard Harrison from the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

The SDO sends on average 1.5 terabytes of data every day, equivalent to downloading about 500,000 songs to an iPod or any other MP3 player.

And as for the iPhone, it might not have been involved in capturing those stunning images but Nasa has not forgotten about the omnipresent device and launched, along with its most advanced solar-dedicated spacecraft, a free iPhone app, 3D Sun.

Yes, there’s an app for that.