Portuguese astrophotographer Miguel Claro took a high-quality video of the full disk of the Sun on October 12, 2023, showing how our star was approaching the maximum of its activity in the 11-year solar cycle.
“The video is “showing a lot of interesting features in motion, such as eruptive prominences, filaments, active regions with minor flares, small spicules dancing like hair in the wind, and a delicate waved line of plasma,” the astrophotographer commented on his work.
A short video shows the slow rotation of the Sun for three hours. During this time, many events take place on its stormy surface. An attentive viewer will notice how the plasma gets trapped by strong solar magnetic fields at an altitude of hundreds of kilometres above the surface before an explosive “shot” into outer space.
The video was filmed in the dark sky site in Portugal’s Alqueva Dark Sky Reserve using the Player One Saturn-M SQR camera and the Lunt LS100 telescope. In just three hours of filming, about three terabytes of raw data were generated. Then Miguel edited the video for several days, from which he later created a 5K high-resolution short video lasting one and a half minutes, consisting of 246 separate video fragments.
Miguel Claro is a professional photographer and amateur astronomer living in Lisbon (Portugal). He creates impressive images of the night sky and is the official photographer of the European Southern Observatory, as well as a participant in The World At Night project and the official astrophotographer of the Dark Sky Alqueva Reserve. You can view his other works on Instagram.
Earlier, we reported on how NASA photography revealed the secret of the true colour of our Sun.
According to Space
Follow us on Twitter to get the most interesting space news in time
https://twitter.com/ust_magazine
