The beautiful surface of the Sun

Phil Plait linked to this amazing photo of the Sun on the Bad Astronomy blog today. It's incredible. Like nothing I've ever seen before. The photographer is Alan Friedman. Plait explains how Friedman got this look, which is a very nice reminder that space photography is seldom really about "point and click".

Alan uses an Hα filter, which cuts out almost all the light from the Sun except for a narrow slice of color emitted by warm hydrogen. This reduces the glare hugely, and reveals delicate structures in the Sun’s plasma. He then inverts the image, so bright things appear dark, and vice-versa. That’s an old astronomer’s trick that makes fainter things easier to see.

Like this close-up? Go to the Bad Astronomy blog to see Alan Friedman's photo of the full Sun. Your mind will be blown. I promise.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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MORE: photography • Science • solar system • Space • sun

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http://twitter.com/danhhoang Danh Hoang

I see an owl.
- Lobster
  
  Everyone is fond of owls.
  - http://twitter.com/kpkpkp Kevin Pierce
    
    Owls are delicious. Little known fact: Chickens taste like owls.
- http://www.hamishmacdonald.com/ hamishmacdonald
  
  I see the mouth of a 3rd-stage Guild Navigator.
  
  …and realise that’s nerdy. But still, there it is!
- http://twitter.com/kpkpkp Kevin Pierce
  
  I see a lion!
- francoisroux
  
  I came here to ask if anybody else saw the owl and the first comment is someone who saw it. How cool is that?
  
  From your name I deduct we are from very different cultural backgrounds. Which proofs to me that we are not so different, we see the same things when we look through the same eyes…
Jorpho

It’s nice, I guess, but not worthy of hyperbole. “Like nothing I’ve ever seen before”? It brings to mind a microscope image of a dust particle – or even a macroscopic image of a piece of fluff.
- http://maggiekb.com/ Maggie Koerth-Baker
  
  Or a bowling ball.
  
  Okay. How about if what I really meant was, “Like no image of the Sun I’ve ever seen before”?
  - http://www.matthewpetty.com/ Matthew Petty
    
    I see a liquid mixture of particles, like the stuff they injected Wolverine with.
  - lafave
    
    I also thought bowling ball.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Tanya-Hugyecz/1804530220 Tanya Hugyecz

Mind: blown

Liek Jorpho, I thought it looked like something hugely magnified (instead of exactly the opposite!), but I was thinking more biological. This a bacteria, or a virus (do they look like that? probably not) or a fungus spore.
LintMan

Compare the full sun photo to this one:
http://www.visualphotos.com/image/1×7548777/human_egg_cell_and_sperm_cells_esem
fractos

Link to the full sun one… stunning (new desktop bg):
http://www.avertedimagination.com/img_pages/x-rated2.html
haineux

SOLARIS. (the book, by Stanislaw Lem.)
http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul

The color so makes me crave raspberry sherbet.
http://twitter.com/austinburns Austin Burns

It was also the Astronomy Picture of the Day yesterday http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120314.html . And you should really make that site one of your daily visits, it always has great stuff.
manveruppd

Is it only me who sees a rageface?

http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/k629/manveruppd/ragesuncaption.jpg
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=30003282 Houston Lang
  
  Ôu☼
gullevek

This one is just awesome, but as others have already linked, the full sun disk has to be seen too. This is just so abstract, it is almost not comprensible, that this is the sun after all.
Brie

I see Stewie from Family Guy.
BombBlastLightingWaltz

Ionic pattering. Wonder what keeps it from blowing to smithereens