Corvus Eye Observatory, Athens & Syros, Greece: Images of The Sun in H-ALPHA, Prominences 4

Our Srar

Our Star
Its image is mesmerizing - out of this world - through a solar telescope...
A star full of life, willing to talk to you, sometimes through its carefree fairies (prominences), dancing at the disk limbs or its black halos (sun spots) and serpentine figures (filaments), crawling on its surface making any observer gazing at them in awe...

A fascinating spectacle changing every day without repeating the magic of the previous day...
This is what makes it a unique, worth observing celestial object by amateur and professional astronomers alike....

Thank you for visiting my Blog
Peter Desypris

Hydrogen-alpha & White Light Solar imaging

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Images of The Sun in H-ALPHA, Prominences 4

Image via Wikipedia

I found this fascinating quote today:

Paradoxically, prominences are cooler than the surrounding atmosphere. They are columns of sun-stuff trapped and held up in the magnetic fields above the solar surface. The trapped plasma cools, recombines into hydrogen atoms and then emits visible light to show up as a prominence. The glowing gas twists and swirls in the sway of the magnetic fields and can change its appearance from minute to minute.Peter Desypris, Corvus Eye Observatory- Syros,Greece, Jan 2010

You should read the whole article.

OUR STAR....

The star around which the Earth revolves, and the gravitational center of the Solar System; it lies about 270,000 times closer to us than the next nearest star. The Sun is a solitary, yellow dwarf star of spectral type G2 (see G star) that has been on the main sequence for about 4.6 billion years.

The Sun consists largely of hydrogen (71% by mass) and helium (27%), with much smaller amounts of heavier elements. It puts out 400 trillion trillion watts of energy, produced by the fusion of hydrogen to helium by the carbon-nitrogen cycle in its core. The Sun is 109 times wider than the Earth. It spins on its axis with a period that varies from 25 days at the equator to 33.5 days near the poles.

The visible surface, or photosphere, is surrounded by the chromosphere and, beyond this, the corona.

distance	149,597,900 km (92,975,699 mi., 8.3 light-minutes)
spectral type	G2V
diameter	1,392,000 km (865,000 mi.)
surface temperature	5,400ºC (9,800ºF)
central temperature	14 million ºC (25 million ºF)
mass (Earth = 1)	332,946
density (water = 1)	1.409
surface gravity (Earth =1 )	27.90
escape velocity	617.5 km/s (383.8 mi./s)
rotation period	25.38 days
apparent magnitude	-26.8
absolute magnitude	4.83