The Sun As You’ve Never Seen It Before! – Video




The Sun As You #39;ve Never Seen It Before!
A crucial, and often underappreciated, facet of science lies in deciding how to turn the raw numbers of data into useful, understandable information -- often through graphs and images. Such visualization techniques are needed for everything from making a map of planetary orbits based on nightly measurements of where they are in the sky to colorizing normally invisible light such as X-rays to produce "images" of the sun. More information, of course, requires more complex visualizations and occasionally such images are not just informative, but beautiful too. Such is the case with a new technique created by Nicholeen Viall, a solar scientist at NASA #39;s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. She creates images of the sun reminiscent of Van Gogh, with broad strokes of bright color splashed across a yellow background. But it #39;s science, not art. The color of each pixel contains a wealth of information about the 12-hour history of cooling and heating at that particular spot on the sun. That heat history holds clues to the mechanisms that drive the temperature and movements of the sun #39;s atmosphere, or corona. To look at the corona from a fresh perspective, Viall created a new kind of picture, making use of the high resolution provided by NASA #39;s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). SDO #39;s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) provides images of the sun in 10 different wavelengths, each approximately corresponding to a single temperature of material. Therefore, when one looks at the ...From:NASAexploreViews:0 0ratingsTime:02:07More inScience Technology

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The Sun As You've Never Seen It Before! - Video

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