Featured Image: A Solar Eclipse from the Ground and Space

This stunning image of the Sun and its corona (click for a closer look) is composited from hundreds of individual frames captured by Nicolas Lefaudeux at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The occasion: a team effort to image a total solar eclipse in July 2019.

In a recent Research Note led by Christian Lockwood (Williams College), you can read about how the team gathered images (like those composited above) using three different observatories in Chile during the eclipse. Lockwood and collaborators then combined these ground-based images — which had high resolution and a wide field of view — with close-in observations of the solar disk made by space-based satellites.

By putting these overlapping observations together, the team could paint a full picture of the Sun’s tenuous, extended outer atmosphere during solar minimum. To learn more about the project, check out the article below.

Citation

“Compositing Eclipse Images from the Ground and from Space,” Christian A. Lockwood et al 2020 Res. Notes AAS 4 133. doi:10.3847/2515-5172/abacb5