Ned Potter is the science correspondent for ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson." He has reported on such topics as space exploration, the human genome and climate change.
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Solar Notes
March 26, 2007 5:49 PM
A quick followup to last week's post on the cool new images of the Sun, on which Mike asked a question about scale.
The flares you're seeing easily extend for thousands of miles, and can be much larger. NASA sent me this image:
For most things solar, we're talking pretty big. The darkest part of a sunspot is typically larger than the earth.
And the videos posted last week by NASA were time-lapse, sped up about 300-fold. Otherwise, in a short clip, you'd see no movement at all.
The folks who put together such imagery do that largely for us landlubbers, but it helps them as well. It's often been pointed out that Hubble Telescope shots are more colorful than what you'd see if you were in deep space to look for yourself, but scientists find it useful. If they decide that, say, hydrogen in a picture will be yellow and helium will be blue, they can "read" the picture more easily. More HERE.
March 26, 2007 | Permalink | Share | User Comments (1)
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That photo showing the scale of Earth as compared to the Sun is most certainly dramatic, and clearly shows how infinitesimal we are. And many thanks for link to the NASA article showing how colorization is used to enhance Hubble photographs. I knew NASA colorized their photos to enhance them, but they'd probably be spectaular no matter what!
Posted by: chuck | Mar 27, 2007 4:06:10 PM
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