NASA captures a Halloween Sun
Authors
Iain Todd is BBC Sky at Night Magazine's Content Editor. He fell in love with the night sky when he caught his first glimpse of Orion, aged 10.
A scorching, fiery Halloween pumpkin is revealed in an image highlighting the active regions of our Sun.
This fiery jack o' lantern is actually an image of our Sun captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which observes our host star as it orbits Earth and is one of many spacecraft dedicated to the study of the Sun.
The active regions in the image are brighter because those areas emit more light and energy. They are actually intense magnetic fields hovering in the Sun's corona; the outermost part of the Sun's atmosphere.
Observatory NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory
Release date 14 October 2014
Image credit NASA/SDO
Iain Todd is BBC Sky at Night Magazine's Content Editor. He fell in love with the night sky when he caught his first glimpse of Orion, aged 10.
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