by An astrophotographer has captured a stunningly beautiful image of a huge cloud of plasma being ejected from the Sun.
The fiery filament, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), extended into space more than 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from the solar surface, according to the photographer.
The photo was taken on September 24 by professional astrophotographer and Arizona resident Andrew McCarthy, who shared the stunning sight on Reddit on September 25 in the r/space subreddit.
The CME was part of a small solar storm – a category G-1, the lowest category on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) geomagnetic storm scale – and was headed away from Earth, according to SpaceWeather.com.
The ethereal ejection was “the largest CME I’ve ever seen,” McCarthy wrote on Reddit.
The plasma was initially contained in a large loop attached to the Sun’s surface, known as a bulge, and then broke off and flowed into space at about 100,000 mph (161,000 km/h), McCarthy added.
Related: Could a Solar Storm Ever Destroy Earth?
The photo is a composite false-color time-lapse image that stacks hundreds of thousands of images taken over a six-hour period, McCarthy wrote.
Between 30 and 80 individual images were taken every second and then stored in a file that eventually topped out at around 800 gigabytes. The images were then combined to show the CME in glorious detail.
In the photo, the surface of the Sun and the CME appear orange – but they are not. The chromosphere (the lowest region of the Sun’s atmosphere) and CMEs naturally emit a type of light that appears pinkish-red to us and is known as hydrogen-alpha or H-alpha light.
But because the exposure time of each image was so short, the original images were almost completely white. McCarthy digitally added the orange while compositing the final image, to provide contrast between individual structures on the solar surface and highlight the CME.
However, since the rest of the image was not filtered with orange, the Sun retains an eerie white halo that stands out against the dark backdrop of space.
CMEs have become more frequent in recent months as the Sun has entered a period of increased solar activity known as solar maximum, which lasts about seven years. This will provide many more opportunities for people to capture similar images.
“We’ll see more of this as we move toward solar maximum,” McCarthy wrote. The plasma plumes are also likely to become “progressively larger,” he added.
The photographer warned people not to try to observe the Sun without the proper equipment.
“Don’t point a telescope at the Sun,” McCarthy wrote on Reddit. “You’ll fry your camera or worse, your eyes.”
The telescope he used to photograph the CME was “specially modified with multiple filters” in order to safely observe the CME and capture the images, he added.
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This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.
