Our Sun is a wonderful, active, and occasionally downright spooky star if you look at it right. As luck would have it, the Sun presented a decidedly Jack-o-Lantern face to the Solar Dynamics Observatory on October 8 2014.
Suffice to say, we could never see the Sun like this with our own eyes. Instead, the Jack-o-Lantern image was created by combining two sets of ultraviolet images that would normally be colored gold and yellow. But since it’s so close to Halloween, the SDO team went with black and orange and the result is hallow-eerie-awesome! You can view the individual images that made up the Jack-o-Lantern composite at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center website.
Even though our Sun has been relatively weak compared to recent decades, it still puts on tremendous displays of magnetic activity. Its magnetic field lines get twisted and form regions of magnetic activity on the surface of the Sun. We see these active regions as sunspots in the visible part of the spectrum, but in ultraviolet we can see the plasma suspended in these magnetic field lines. The result is spectacular:
Happy Halloween!
