The sun’s beauty

Hoping you don’t think I’m a total astro-nut, here is another shot of something you should see. There was a total eclipse of the sun Friday. An amateur astronomer in Russia took several exposures and made this composite of the moon in front of the sun. Here’s the report:

The sun's wispy, dancing, mysteriously-hot outer atmosphere is one of the prettiest sights in the heavens. The trick is seeing it. Under normal circumstances, blinding sunlight hides the corona from sensitive human eyes. Last Friday, however, was not normal.

Hartwig Luethen took the picture on August 1st when the Moon passed directly in front of the sun, briefly revealing the corona for all to see. To photograph the eclipse, Luethen stationed himself in Kochenovo, west of Novosibirsk, Russia, deep inside the path of totality. “I used a Canon 350D to make 24 exposures varying in length from 1/500 to 2 seconds.” The resulting composite shows the ghostly corona, a magnetic prominence surging over the lunar limb, and the Earthlit surface of the Moon itself.

You can find things like this for yourself every day at http://www.spaceweather.com
That’s where this comes from.