An astrophotographer captured a spectacular timelapse of the Sun at a time of greatly increased solar storm activity.
Miguel Claro captured Earth’s star on October 12 as it approaches its maximum activity in its 11-year solar cycle.
“I took a solar timelapse of an entire full disc of the Sun, 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 floating hundreds of kilometers above the Sun’s surface, stuck by the strong magnetic fields, until has been released into space in a blink of an eye,” writes Claro on his Vimeo page.
“The video shows the chromosphere while the Sun is rotating over the course of three hours. The timelapse sequence was captured from Dark Sky Alqueva territory with a Player One Saturn-M SQR camera and a Lunt telescope LS100, generating three terabytes of data.”
“The final result is a 5K high-resolution solar movie comprising 246 images over the course of about three hours, between UT 11:05 and UT 14:08,” he adds.
Capturing the Solar System
PetaPixel previously featured Claro’s image of a long-traveling comet that had a broken tail and was making passage through the solar system.
For that project, he took a modified Nikon D850 full-frame DSLR to the Dark Sky Alqueva Observatory in Portugal.
“For this particular shot, I did 14 images at 200 seconds each and combined everything in a total of 47 minutes, using advanced programs such as PixInsight,” Claro told PetaPixel at the time.
Claro is from Lisbon, Portugal and regularly creates incredible images of the deep night sky. He is a European Southern Observatory Photo Ambassador and member of The World At Night. He’s also the official astrophotographer of the Dark Sky Alqueva Reserve.
According to Space, Claro specializes in astronomical “Skyscapes” that connect both Earth and the night sky.
To buy a print of Miguel Claro’s photos, head to his website where there are many more spectacular pictures available.
For more of Claro’s work, head to his Facebook and Instagram.
Image credits: All photos by Miguel Claro.
