
Sun's surface seen in  new detail - Patient0
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51305216
======
minimalc
I work as a graduate SW engineer at Andor, which produced the SCMOS camera
they used to capture the images ([https://andor.oxinst.com/balor-
scmos](https://andor.oxinst.com/balor-scmos)).

Quite a nice surprise to see during my morning commute! Everyone here is
extremely pleased to see how the images turned out. Very impressive work from
DKIST

~~~
joshspankit
If you don’t mind the curiosity:

These images seem to have a sort of “enhanced blurring” and depth-flattening
reminiscent of early 3d ultrasounds.

Am I interpreting that right? Or is the surface of the sun really like that?

~~~
minimalc
You'd have to ask a solar physicist about those solar structures I'm afraid or
an optical expert about the image properties, I just work with camera
software. If you haven't already you can download their press release which
goes into a bit more detail than the main article [1].

I've also found some interesting bonus footage of the camera in a test setup
for those that are curious (the actuating gray box in the background) [2]

[1] [https://www.nso.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2020/01/MediaKit.zip](https://www.nso.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2020/01/MediaKit.zip) (1.25GB)

[2]
[https://www.nso.edu/telescopes/dkist/image17/](https://www.nso.edu/telescopes/dkist/image17/)

------
amatecha
You can view all the photos and videos directly on the National Solar
Observatory's website: [https://www.nso.edu/inouye-solar-telescope-first-
light/](https://www.nso.edu/inouye-solar-telescope-first-light/) (and press
release at [https://www.nso.edu/press-release/inouye-solar-telescope-
fir...](https://www.nso.edu/press-release/inouye-solar-telescope-first-light/)
)

Would way prefer people link the original sources in cases like this, where
the news articles add almost nothing useful and instead bombard me with
advertisements and user-tracking, etc.

~~~
leeoniya
utterly unusable on mobile. at least bbc has that part worked out.

~~~
SiempreViernes
The BBC only shows a very zoomed out video though, so you don't actually see
the new bit, making it an article about new resolution illustrated at pretty
low resolution -_-

~~~
DoctorOetker
I'm not seeing a video, could you give the URL of the actual media file
instead?

~~~
ian0
[https://www.nso.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/DKIST-
First-L...](https://www.nso.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/DKIST-First-Light-
MZ-crop1-loop_4K-H264.mp4)

4K – H.264 (45 MB)

There are some others here:

[https://www.nso.edu/telescopes/dkist/first-light-cropped-
fie...](https://www.nso.edu/telescopes/dkist/first-light-cropped-field-movie/)

Non cropped ones here:

[https://www.nso.edu/telescopes/dkist/first-light-full-
field-...](https://www.nso.edu/telescopes/dkist/first-light-full-field-movie/)

------
ArtWomb
The granule flow in that animation would make a great RNG ;)

Congrats to all involved, and kudos for ushering in a new golden age of solar
observations

At first glance of the static image, it appeared to me the granular structure
of solar surface convection resembled a thousand other phenomena in Nature:
poly-crystalline grain boundaries in metal alloys, lipid cells in fatty
tissue, colloidal suspensions of cloud smoke

But watching the animation made me realize how unique and dissimilar this is
to any other chaotic turbulent flow

Due to the sun's gargantuan scale, even throwing the world's fastest
supercomputers at the problem, we cannot adequately simulate all the
convection, plasma, rotation and magnetic interactions of solar surface and
interior dynamics

These images make me feel very humbled, reminding us of our place in the
cosmos!

Weak influence of near-surface layer on solar deep convection zone revealed by
comprehensive simulation from base to surface

[https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau2307](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau2307)

~~~
joshspankit
The next wave of closely-guarded RNG secrets could very well be which solar
coordinates your camera is pointed at!

------
mncharity
For anyone curious, some years ago I talked with the NSO outreach folks, and
they were aware then that the Sun is white, and that yellow/orange is a
misconception widespread and problematic in both astronomy education and the
general US population, and that their colorizations were not helping with
that. Their justification was roughly that you need to hook people with what
they expect, and only then can you make progress with educating them. I
thought and think that that's very much the wrong call, as well as over the
line ethically, but... oh well.

Though the misconception really is pervasively widespread, even among first-
tier astronomy graduate students, so perhaps there might now be a degree of
confusion present as well. And a (very) few instances of colorization are
representationally valid, if unfortunate in their collateral damage, as when
representing that some instrument's sampling band is in yellow.

~~~
mturmon
You have mentioned a neat point that illustrates some of the complexity of an
"image" like the ones shown.

After 20 or so minutes poking around, I'm not 100% sure what instrument took
the images in the OP. There are five focal planes that can get the light from
this much-anticipated solar telescope, which has been envisioned and
prototyped going back at least 20 years.

Anyway, I think the instrument for the images was VBI, the Visible Broadband
Imager
([https://www.nso.edu/telescopes/dkist/instruments/vbi/](https://www.nso.edu/telescopes/dkist/instruments/vbi/)).
It takes images in 8 spectral bands, in the visible range. But these bands are
very narrow, like 0.5nm or less. (Solar astronomy is cool that way, lots of
photons of whatever energy you want.) The specific bands have been carefully
selected.

One band that page calls call "continuum" (sometimes referred to as "pseudo-
white-light", found in the "spectral resolution" submenu) is at 450nm, in the
blue. All the 8 various bands illustrate activity at different altitudes in
the solar atmosphere. The 450nm band will be from the solar photosphere, where
sunspots and other familiar features live. Some others are much higher up, and
sunspots will not be present as such in those bands.

If this conjecture is true, the displayed images are taken in a very narrow
slice of spectrum around 450nm (or another one around 668nm, which _is_ in
red) and then mapped through a black/orange/yellow/white color map for
display. This kind of "colorization" is pervasive throughout solar astronomy,
and used universally by astronomers themselves for their own science images.
(Visit
[https://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/newsite/images.html](https://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/newsite/images.html)
and weep.)

As hinted in your last sentence, it's not at all clear what a "correct"
colormap for light from 450nm +/\- 0.5nm should be. Shades of blue?

For more on your point: [http://solar-
center.stanford.edu/SID/activities/GreenSun.htm...](http://solar-
center.stanford.edu/SID/activities/GreenSun.html) (old-fashioned site, but
technically 100% solid).

~~~
lolc
The source article[0] linked in another thread says the images are of the
789nm band.

[0] [https://www.nso.edu/inouye-solar-telescope-first-
light/](https://www.nso.edu/inouye-solar-telescope-first-light/)

------
lifeisstillgood
May I recommend this weeks BBC "In Our Time" podcast on Solar Wind (I cannot
link to it because my podcast app just throws up some html card thingy
destroying 30 years of sanity / rant / moan)

As usual a deeply knowledgeable and enthusiastic set of guests and they were
talking about this telescope and several other probes launched and due to be
launched

well worth it

~~~
alamortsubite
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000dg9n](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000dg9n)

------
newnewpdro
> Each night, a swimming pool’s worth of ice is emptied into eight tanks.
> During the day, coolant is routed through the ice tanks and distributed
> through the observatory by 7.5 miles (12km) of piping. More than 100 air
> jets are also positioned behind the main mirror.

Are they actually making a swimming pool's worth of ice cubes that are
"emptied" into these tanks? I looked at the wikipedia page [0] for more
information but there's no mention of the cooling system.

It sounds like a major part of the interesting engineering challenge, strange
to not find photos or even a description of the cooling system's design.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_K._Inouye_Solar_Telesco...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_K._Inouye_Solar_Telescope)

~~~
orbital-decay
Yes - they actually make ice from the collected rainwater. Here's the paper
with an overview of their cooling system:
[https://doi.org/10.1117/12.924592](https://doi.org/10.1117/12.924592)

Notably, the telescope enclosure is actively cooled to mitigate thermal seeing
effects.

~~~
buildbot
That was an interesting read, thanks!

------
OnACoffeeBreak
Something I just realized while reading this article is that the Earth is only
about 100 solar diameters from the Sun. This was completely out of proportion
with my gut feel.

Edit: change "radii" to "diameters"

~~~
ljcn
About 200 actually (you mistook the diameter for the radius).

[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+au+%2F+radius+of+the...](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+au+%2F+radius+of+the+sun)

~~~
OnACoffeeBreak
Yes, you are correct. I meant diameters.

------
keyle
It's weird I wrote some sun materials in the past, for a game, and I ended up
roughly with that. What I based myself on was a sci-fi movie (can't remember),
and they had it right. Can't really figure out why it looks that way though,
anyone care to explain why it rises and drops like that? Is there anything
like currents, or it's a straight up and down? Does the sun rotate at all or
it's 'static' from our perspective? (I imagine it's rotating with the stars
within our galaxy)

~~~
samplatt
>a sci-fi movie (can't remember)

Sunshine, perhaps?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(2007_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_\(2007_film\))

Brilliant, brilliant film. The premise is shonky as they come but it's obvious
that the film itself has little to do with the premise. Awesome acting,
literally- _awesome_ SFX (their ability to give the sun so much _weight_ is
amazing, you really get a sense of an immortal unstoppable force), and a
message that's neither shallow nor deep but prompts some self-reflection in
ways you don't expect.

~~~
nkrisc
Maybe I'll give it a shot. For me the premise occupies a sort of uncanny
valley of realism: there's no space wizards or wormholes or FTL or aliens, but
it's also not realistic enough to be something that could happen. It's kind of
like that movie The Day After Tomorrow. It felt like there _should_ have been
some kind of mystical or supernatural force behind it all because it could
never happen as presented, but they want it to come across as plausible.

~~~
samplatt
No, it's nothing _The Day After Tomorrow_ ; the characters in _sunshine_
aren't paper-thin stereotypes. I'd say it's a lot more like _Interstellar_ \-
though all three involve "do or die" threats to the character to propel the
plot, it's much more a drama working within the constraints of a proposed
system, rather than a dumb big-budget thriller.

------
olivermarks
[https://www.nso.edu/press-release/inouye-solar-telescope-
fir...](https://www.nso.edu/press-release/inouye-solar-telescope-first-light/)

------
rwmj
Going to be a good decade for Sun observations because the Parker Solar Probe
will make closer and closer passes around the Sun for the next 5 years.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Solar_Probe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Solar_Probe)

~~~
gadders
And the ESA Solar Orbiter:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Orbiter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Orbiter)

------
HenryKissinger
This is great. But I really hope to see close pictures of the Sun during my
lifetime. And by close, I mean ultra high resolution pictures and footage
taken from one million kilometers or closer. I want to see the grainy detail
of these cell like structures.

------
foota
Man, it says each of those cells is 30k km, imagine how quickly the plasma
most be moving in there for the effects you see to happen.

~~~
FPGAhacker
It says each cell is the size of France. The resolution of the scope is 30km.

~~~
bravoetch
Yeah but how many Libraries of Congress is France across?

~~~
markdown
I want to know how many american football fields long it is, and how many
olympic-sized swimming pools all that plasma would fill up.

~~~
hnuser123456
[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+sun+%2F+volu...](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+sun+%2F+volume+of+olympic+swimming+pool)

------
mirimir
> The observations could help resolve longstanding mysteries of the sun,
> including the counterintuitive feature that the corona – the sun’s
> atmosphere – is heated to millions of degrees when its surface is only
> 6,000C.

Is that really a "mystery"?

I mean, you can easily create plasma in a microwave oven, and the magnetron
doesn't get very hot.

~~~
praptak
The magnetron does not produce the energy though. That's what makes the sun
case counterintuitive.

~~~
mirimir
I guess.

But consider that the total thermal energy of the Sun is negligible compared
to the total energy flux. And that thermal conduction is way too slow, anyway.

~~~
mirimir
Really, do the math. Take the sun's mass, and multiply by average absolute
temperature and the specific heat of hydrogen. That'll be a huge number, but
far less than the sun's energy output.

You could also compare energy output with what's possible through thermal
conduction, based on the sun's radius, its density at various depths, and the
heat transfer coefficient of hydrogen.

------
dchasson
This news is stunningly correlated to my lecture this morning from Dr Bailey
at Virginia Tech. The man was in Alaska finishing the launch of his sounding
rocket for NASA.

The ideal gas law dictates these amazing structures of the solar atmosphere.
But.... incredible cosmic magnetic powers influence these structures in the
solar atmosphere... That we still can't explain.

Later I hope to discover alien life in the distributions of charged particles
and their induced magnet fields... I may need to aquire another degree in the
mean time.

#fields #studyhard

~~~
mirimir
In _Surface Detail_ , Iain Banks mentioned life forms based on stellar
magnetic fields.

It also has an amusing ship mind, which presents as a young male sociopath:
"Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints".

------
DoctorOetker
Does anyone know where I can find DC-blocked audiorate measurements of solar
intensty / noise? Or alternatively forward me to an observatory that measures
this?

~~~
hnuser123456
It would be a source of background noise in the LIGO readings which were
converted to audio, but I'm not sure how loud the sun is relative to other
cosmic (and terrestrial) phenomena, and of course those clips are also going
to feature a loud chirp from merging neutron stars and black holes.

[https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/video/ligo20160211v2](https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/video/ligo20160211v2)

------
KindOne
Discussion 9 hours ago, The Guardian:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22185565](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22185565)

~~~
dang
We've merged that discussion hither.

------
jcims
Can't wait to see sunspots this close. What if they all have an angry face in
them?

