Slashdot Mirror
Incredible Images of the Sun
shelterit writes "A new swedish telescope facility in La Palma uses a new technology to remove the blurriness of the atmosphere to snap new and astonishingly sharp images of the sun. Want to have a closer look at the surface of it? Reminds me of paintings I did as a kid."
Still not as good as space based, but a damn sight cheaper! :)
\/eeoh
What in the world are they thinking putting them up as 3MB GIFs? I understand the need for super accuracy for some purposes, hence the need for lossless TIFFs, but there should be JPEGs for people who don't need perfect reproductions: The smooth gradients lend themselves to JPEG compression.
I live in Sweden and I haven't seen the sun for ages. If my calendar is correct.. i might see the sun again in 3-4 months time. I really don't know if I can stand it that long.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
MSNBC posted this article last night http://www.msnbc.com/news/834647.asp It might be more reachable...
you obviously didn't live in the UK then. My paintings always had that 'grey sky' look.
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
Took me awhile to find out how it works. In a nutshell: "The adaptive mirror actually changes shape 1000 times a second in order to adjust for the rapidly changing blurring of the image. Finally, we are using techniques to further sharpen the images after they have been captured by electronic cameras. In the best images the resolution is close to 0.1 arcseconds. This is a factor of 1200 better than 20/20 vision."
You can't fool us, that's really one of van Gogh's sunflower paintings.
Maybe slashdot could offer mirroring of websites that need it before they link them. CNN and NYTimes might be able to handle the extra traffic but a geocities page will not.
Help I'm a rock.
So will some kind hearts who can still access it copy the pages FTTB? I would myself, but I can't get in...
But it's nice the general scientific community still shares its assets, instead of copyrighting it and hiding it behind massive fees, like Craig Venter did.
<Offtopic> ;-)
Now if only I could find a geological map of the Netherlands without the usual atlas texts all over them, so i can make a nice RT2 simulation of the Dutch railways growth since trains got invented.
</Offtopic>
Stefan
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
Hey, at least he didnt link the 3MB TIFF...
Err... Oops
Janie took my gun...
Sunset will be canceled tonight, due to the slashdotting of the sun.
If you look real close on that image, a little to the left of the giant black spot, you can just about see the Old Navy crew in their cargo shorts. Glad to know that advertisement worked.
In case the above site gets roasted, space.com also has pics and article.
This article has the links.You can also zoom in and use the viewer.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
We've been to the moon, and Mars will be next, followed by Venus, but what will we do when we've run out of planets? Clearly the option is the Sun.
Photos like these will show us where the potential landing sites are. Very useful since the lander will have to find somewhere that's not only flat but free of excessive RF noise so that we can communicate with Earth.
So, obviously, someone will ask - How can we possible build something to get to the sun? Well, this is quite simple, Firstly we use regrigeration devices. These will require some considerable energy, as well as a decent fusion power source to keep them going. Secondly, we avoif reflective surfaces. The other thing to remember is that we only need to travel during the night. During the day is when the sun is hottest, so travel at night should help cool us considerably. This will require better propulsion mechanisms that can do the bulk of the travelling in the 12 hours of night.
The images are slashdotted, so I've provided a mirror. Go outside (that's through the door over there, pale face) and look up.
Darn cool, or should I say hot, pictures!
:-)
The web server seem to be running "hot" as well.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
well, at least the closeup of a sunspot and one of the filaments. but please be nice, it's a new powermac, i don't want it melted just yet :P
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
I don't need to burn my pupils to see a good view of the sun from the earth. But that spf 300 lotion burnt more then the sun ever did...
The image looks a bit cloudy. I think there's something on the monitor.
apparently its here...
whoops
Also available at APOD - Astronomy Picture of the Day . Enjoy.
Here are the images from the site -- a picture of the Sun:
____
/ \
| |
| |
\____/
Hope that helps to beat the Slashdotting.
site's burnt already...looks like that's what you get for staring into the sun.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
And this is Michael's fault how?
Seriously they chose to put large size images linked from a press release - I mean they're not even deep links, nor is this one near the bottom of the page. Its probably one of the most likely links everyone will click on if they read the story. Its linked from a press release they expect this too be read, its not like we slashdotted a tiny departmental server.
Does moving it from a 2 click (slashdot story - press release image - gif) to 1 click[1] (slashdot story) really justify a personal broadside against the editorial integerity of one the slashdot team?
Comment on the fact that maybe they should be warned so they remove the high res links until the slashdotting is over, maybe comment on the poor web design approach of the academic team involved, any number of these are valid responses to this story.
Your response adds nothing to the story, nor is what I would expect from someone (judging by you name and email) who is experienced at proffesionally critiquing and assess others work in thier career. Or do peer reviews in Academia these days descend to personal attacks, unwarranted sarcasm and flamewars too?
It seems a strange contrast to your statement about stupidity on the site, did you mean the content of the site or the quality and relevance of the posts on it?
[1]1-Click is of course patented by Amazon, so we must be careful...
If they're really seeing the actual surface features of the sun to this detail without synthesizing data then maybe the same technique can be applied to extrasolar planets to image details as small as life forms.
The technology used by this telescope to counter the effects of the atmosphere in measurements is called adaptive optics. This is the first application I know of for adaptive optics on a solar telescope.
.
This technology has been around for awhile, and was first seriously developed by the military at the Starfire Optical Range
Recently it has been used in such telescope projects as the WM Keck Observatory and Gemini Project . I know AO is also used for measurement of eye aberrations, with projects being conducted at several Universities. For more information about Adaptive Optics, I suggest the Center for Adaptive Optics
My personal experience with AO was as an intern for Gemini this past summer. I helped write parallel code for a program that simulates current and future adaptive optics systems planned for the next generation of extremely large telescopes.
Well now the fun with these super detailed pictures is to see if we can pick out images!
If you scroll down to the "bottom" of that image, line yourself up with the very top of that monstrous sunspot and then cut directly left, you can see a nearly perfect image of a face.
*sigh*
Now I guess we sit back and wait for the conspiracy theories to fly.
Btw, I tried to stare at the sun once when I was a kid, that was stupid. I was told too late that one can go blind for doing that -- that must explain the glasses today...
It'd make the dopest desktop wallpaper to have these closeup images live, near-realtime, on my OSX desktop.
:)
Then I could actually finally have a decent use for transparent Term windows, I guess...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Question: Why can't they point Hubble at the Sun and get even better photos? Is Hubble not equipped for such a task?
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
From my days doing Earth Observation Science (EOS) I recall that a lot of satellite imaging, whether astronomical or remote sensing, seemed to follow a de-facto standard of a 512 x 512 x 8bit image tile per channel on the instrument.
GIFs were often used because it is a very stable way of doing lossless compression at 8bit, stable as in almost any image program can read them.
This is not the case with TIFFs as there are a number of variants and options in the file format.
TIFFs are however a better medium for storage of composite images, either spatially or spectorally (montages or multichannel pseudo colour in english).
Due to its general lack of use as a data storage format most of the tools I used/wrote to proccess image data files generally did not have JPEG support or other common 'display' options as the file is regarded as data, not an image - its a subtle difference but explains the mindset.
When I published stuff on the web I'd run our raw large images through Photoshop to get pleasing images but compact file sizes.
It may not have occured for them to do this, and anyway they may regard this as publishing data for other interested parties to download and process themselves.
Reminds me of paintings I did as a kid."
You painted pictures of 404 errors as a kid? Wow. We slashdotted the sun.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Apparently, staring at the sun isn't healthy for your eyes OR webservers.
the People at Sun get any work done with all that fire and the burning and fusion all going on around them. It's nice that scientists can take pictures of the inside of a leading computer industry company for study, so the rest of the world can see how hard it is to work in the information sector.
What?
Why are you all looking at me like that?
--
Me: http://www.robertdhill.com/
The highest resolution solar image ever shows part of the largest sunspot in Active Region 10030. The central region is dark because the strong magnetic fields there stop upwelling hot gas from the solar interior.
Ok, so that's SUPPOSED to explain why it's dark.. by I thought fire gave off light. While I can see a strong magnetic field blocking gas, shouldn't the surrounding gas give off enough light to see in the hole itself?
Or is the hole just THAT BIG? (But light from the sun gets to us, you'd think it could light a hole from all sides..)
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
"Hmmm, neat let me open up these images here..." *Click* "Ahhh! My Eyes!!!!!!"
What is music when you despise all sound?
Yes, it's that big. Many sunspots are twice the diameter of the earth.
The real reason they are "dark" is that they are cooler than the gas aronud them. Not that they are cold of course. From one of my astro textbooks:
Temperature of sunspot: 3900K
Temperature of surrounding photosphere: 5780K
Resulting in approximately 1/5 the flux (bolometric flux goes as T^4).
Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
Ahh so there's just isn't a 'void' there as "stop upwelling hot gas from the solar interior", would seem to suggest. I guess 'cold' gas is upwelling from the interior :).
That's what I was wondering. Thanks!
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
The Slashdot Effect is well known, and it seems like only the strongest sites are able to handle it. One of those sites, clearly, is Slashdot itself. Seems like there could be some mirroring done on Slashdot before a story is posted. Of course, the obvious problem with this idea is that Slashdot has never been about actual hosted content (other than the comments, which are arguably the best part about the site), but rather links to content on other servers. But it has become pretty much standard procedure to link to a site with extra cool content every two to three days only to find that the site is completely unable to hang (or all-too-able to "hang", if you know what I mean). Mirrors often pop up on their own, which is great, but I always wonder why Slashdot doesn't just mirror the extra cool content anyway (I would imagine we can all guess what kind of content qualifies for pre-mirroring... super-cool pictures of the Sun, for example).
The other issue is one of advance notice, which has already been mentioned in this story's comments. I realize that some information is timely and advance notice is not always possible, but the sun's not going anywhere and there could be advanced notification workflow built into the story approval process (ugh, I said "workflow" and "process" in the same sentence). I would suggest that a "site contact" e-mail address or maybe even a phone number be included with story submissions. The "author" (I've never understood why they're called authors when generally they are administrators or approvers only) could then determine in their best judgement whether they think the site is likely to withstand a good slashdotting and, if not, they can have an e-mail message sent to the contact address, which will advise them of the impending slashdotting and give them some options:
- Can't handle it or don't want it... don't link to my site (yes, I believe that anybody should have the right to link to anybody, unless there's good reason to believe that linking in this way will seriously affect the operating of the target site)
- We would love the publicity but can't handle the load... please mirror and feel free to advertise on the mirrored pages, even replacing any advertisements that we have on our site.
- We're either seriously prepared for this or we want to see what happens to our servers just for fun... fire away
This decision would be made by clicking on a link or filling out a form on the Slashdot site, which would clear that story for submission to the world, once any pre-mirroring takes place.I realize this complicates the process, but Slashdot is no doubt aware of it's impact on sites that it links to, and an otherwise good site that gets killed by a terribly unusual load could be made to look like it's run by incompetents, even if it's in perfectly good hands. I wonder how many sites were actually negatively affected by the Slashdot effect, in either the short or the long term.
So that's my two cents.
Its rather interesting to contrast what the Swedes are doing with advanced optics versus what we Americans are. The Swedes are taking pictures of the sun : we're developing a weapon that can destroy airborne targets with high energy beams of death.
I actually do this sometimes for a whole class of students, and for that I need a big, bright image they can all see, so I use the full aperture of my 8-inch scope. You just have to be careful to limit how long you have it pointed at the sun, because the heat can destroy your eyepiece (melts the glue).
Find free books.
Heck, I see those in the grocery check-out every week. The Bat-boy, Osama playing cards with Satan, images of Jesus on a taco shell, the 3000-pound transvestite. No need for a telescope, they're available in corner markets everywhere.
include $sig;
1;
MtViewGuy says : While this new system works great for the visible spectrum of the Sun's output, you still want a space-based observatory to monitor the Sun's output in the other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum You will note that he ignores the critical first 3 words in that Nasa sentence.
teridon says "no, on the contrary, thats not true", and provides this quote from nasa.gov to support his refutation. "At optical wavelengths, these images are sharper than even current space-based solar observatories can produce."
and gets modded up to 5 ?
Hello.... READ. teridon basically confirmed what the other dude said - it works great, but only for for VISIBLE spectrum.
optical != electomagnetic.
/me shakes his head and mutters...
The Sun is on FIRE!!!! We're doooooooooooommmmeeddd!!!!!
If only we had known this before, maybe we could have done something about it!
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
"Personal note: When I was little my mother told me not to stare into the sun, so when I was six I did."
Why Does The Sun Shine,
by They Might Be Giants
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees
Yo ho, it's hot, the sun is not
A place where we could live
But here on Earth there'd be no life
Without the light it gives
We need its light
We need its heat
We need its energy
Without the sun, without a doubt
There'd be no you and me
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees
The sun is hot
It is so hot that everything on it is a gas: iron, copper, aluminum, and many others.
The sun is large
If the sun were hollow, a million Earths could fit inside. And yet, the sun is only a middle-sized star.
The sun is far away
About 93 million miles away, and that's why it looks so small.
And even when it's out of sight
The sun shines night and day
The sun gives heat
The sun gives light
The sunlight that we see
The sunlight comes from our own sun's
Atomic energy
Scientists have found that the sun is a huge atom-smashing machine. The heat and light of the sun come from the nuclear reactions of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and helium.
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees
The resolution is so good that I think I can make out the ON/OFF switch in one.
Table-ized A.I.
After clicking on an image at the site and waiting for a good couple of minutes, I realized that my request for images of the sun must be realtime and my lag was the transmission time from the sun back to the earth (isn't that a couple of hours?). Stop with the cruel physics jokes guys, my patience is wearing thin...
come on fhqwhgads
So now that they see canals on the Sun, do they think theres water there too?
[alk]
Imagine a beowold cluster of-- No, wait... That'd be a black hole. Nevermind.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
If you scroll ... you can see a nearly perfect image of a face.
It's a phenomenon known as pareidolia , and is quite a fascinating subject in its own right. Briefly, the human mind tends to seek patterns that it recognizes. When faced with a chaotic input, the mind creates patterns where none exist. Carl Sagan argues that faces in particular are hardwired into our recognition centres.
Incidentally, I can't see the face you're talking about there. (I'm probably not tired enough, as I find I'm very prone to seeing faces everywhere after an all-nighter.)
I did find a yin/yang symbol, though...
|>
Here be Dragons
No - Dark Current is very very well understood!
Any matter will radiate energy according to its temperature - you've heard of this as Black Body Radiation.
Now in remote sensing you are often working in the IR region, because
a) this is where the 'windows' in the atmospheres absorption curve are
b) comparision of two bands give us intresting information - eg NVDI tells us the approximate vegitation cover from a simple comparisson of 2 channels.
In this case the detector must be cooler then the thing it is observing, otherwise your detector will respond to radiation emitted by itself and the equipment around it.
In the case of astronomical CCDs a similar effect is at work. CCDs work by creating small pockets in silicon that work very much like capacitors. The energy of photons (light particles) striking the material causes charge to build up in these pockets.
When enough charge has built up you can then 'read' the charge level in a similar way you can read memory (though clearly with more than a binary state) and infer the brightness of each pixel from the charge level.
This is fine for Video/Digital Photography use as a short exposure gets plenty of photons and you have an image.
In astronomy however you take exposure on a timescale of hours, sometimes your image maybe formed from a handful of photons. The problem here is that thermal processes in the CCD material itself can also deposit charge in the pockets by causing small stray currents and from phonon interaction in the silicon lattice itself.
If you cool the CCD in a dewar of liquid nitrogen, you limit these thermal issues, and have long exposures. The cost comes from building electronics that can survive the thermal shock of going from 25 Centigrade to -197 Centigrade in 10 minutes or so, and also having very very high quality CCDs to start with.
Been there, done that to extend the life of the 16inch telescope at my old Uni.
BTW - its not just an astronomy issue, consumers are starting to see it in digital cameras, especially SLR replacements. Take a look at a long exposure and you will see speccles - this is in part due to dark current, and in part due to increasing the gain of the CCD to try and limit the exposure length and therefore dark current issues - a tricky balance to get right, and some are better than others.
Not quite, but almost. :-)
The magnetic fields are forcing upwelling gas away from the spot (hot as well as cold). However, the effect can only be so strong. Even the magnetic fields of the sun can't cause a complete vacuum in the sunspot. Gass will diffuse in from every direction.
The end result is that the region simply has a somewhat lower density than surrounding regions. Lower density==lower temperature==(much) lower luminosity.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
It's Elvis, you dumbass!
Geez.
Sun face must be related to Martian face.
Anyway, NASA puts up a new image every day, which you can check out by bookmarking this URL.
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
http://www.solarphysics.kva.se/NatureNov2002/image s/AR10030_4877_color.jpeg
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.