Best looking image ever captured of the Sun's entire surface goes to:
https://x.com/AJamesMcCarthy/status/1638648459002806272
by
Andrew McCarthy: https://www.instagram.com/cosmic_background/
Jason Guenzel: https://www.instagram.com/thevastreaches/
For anyone that wants to buy the 139 megapixel image for printing, it's $50 here: https://cosmicbackground.io/products/fusion-of-helios
I'm not affiliated, but I've been seriously debating it for a long time. The photo is a composite of the sun and the sun's heliosphere from the 2017 eclipse. One of my favorite images of the Sun.
Do you think that is original or some AI enhanced copy of the twitter img?
It’s the original. Andrew McCarthy links to it from both his Twitter and Instagram accounts. It’s his own website.
Perhaps rr808 is referring to AI upscaling. As in, are these 139 proper megapixels or upreased to that size?
It's made from over 90,000 individual images that have been stitched/combined together. I'm not the original photographer so I can't comment on his process, but I think it would be silly to use upscaling (AI or otherwise) when your starting data set likely contains multiple gigapixels.
I have to imagine capturing an image over five days shows how static something is, not dynamic. Very confusing wording there! Great photo, though.
It's not quite a time lapse. They took 90000 images, but they will be selecting the sharpest and most interesting subset for each section of image, not just smearing them all together.
Maybe static vs. dynamic have different meanings when talking about celestial objects that are billions of years old, 864,000 miles across and a million times the size of the planet you're living on?
I agree! Very odd choice of words indeed. I wonder what semantics they were trying to convey.
That’s beautiful, but not really a photo of the sun. It’s heavily processed and digitally modified.
It’s still a photo of the sun, even if processed. You wouldn’t see much on an unprocessed photo of the sun..
What a disingenuous comment. It's not a generative AI image. It's not something someone drew/painted. It's photographic data combined together.
If you want to be pedantic, every single picture ever taken with a digital camera is digitally modified. Every single image shot on film and scanned to be used on a computer is digitally modified.
Just because you can't take a photo of the sun anywhere close to this does not mean others of us cannot, and does not make their actual images of the sun not real. Using proper filters so you do not melt your equipment allows for images of the photosphere to be captured. Using the moon to filter the photosphere during an eclipse allows the corona to be seen. It's not like it's not there except during an eclipse. It's just too faint to be captured without the filter.
That's what the SRO uses a cornograph to block the photosphere at all times to be able to image the corona.
Imaging the sun is very fun and challenging, and I'd suggest you'd learn a lot from reading up on it. Whether you'd actually enjoy it is beyond the scope of this forum
Sure, but they're not just combining, they're selecting for maximal artistic effect.
> A geometrically altered image of the 2017 eclipse as an artistic element in this composition to display an otherwise invisible structure. Great care was taken to align the two atmospheric layers in a scientifically plausible way using NASA's SOHO data as a reference.
https://cosmicbackground.io/products/fusion-of-helios
I mean, take a look at some of the photographers other work...
https://cosmicbackground.io/products/tales-from-the-solar-sy...
Okay and?
What do you mean, and? They're clarifying the original point, as was expressly requested in the parent comment. The image undoubtedly has some amount of "artistic freedom" taken. What threshold decides when an image becomes more art than science is a parameter that each person is free to decide for themselves. I think it's absolutely relevant to discussion to point out that there might be more "artistic freedom" in this image than most might believe, especially when the post is about photos of the sun of a much more scientific and exact nature.
My point is in what was is “well actually it’s not technically a photograph” helpful, interesting, or relevant contribution to discussion?
Great. It’s not strictly a graph of photons. Zero people are using this stitched together image to perform science. Moreover, virtually every single space image intended for public consumption has been converted from UV/radio/infrared into the visible spectrum, retouched, stitched together as a composite, or experienced some other form of artistic manipulation.
Nobody cares. Nobody should care. This is a thoroughly inconsequential hill to die on and a completely pointless bit of pedantry.
Twitter say "something went wrong", plus three dialogues consuming or obscuring something more than half the page.
Big fan of Andrew McCarthy's work, been following him on IG for a few years now. The stuff he's able to pull off as a backyard astrophotographer is very impressive.