Despite being the center of Earth’s orbit, there’s still a lot we don’t know about our star, the Sun. So, every time we get an up-close glimpse of this star, it’s always exciting.
Photographer Andrew McCarthy captured stunning close-up shots of the sun in stunning detail.
McCarthy captured the flaming ball with a special solar telescope, pointing toward the sun for five hours.
The photographer shared the dazzling video on his social media account. “There’s a party on the sun but you’re not invited,” joked the space lover.
He warned others not to try to look at the sun with a telescope themselves. He wrote on Twitter: “Don’t try this unless you know what you’re doing. You will go blind or start a fire if you point a telescope at the sun.”
McCarthy released the stunning video over the weekend, which provides an exceptional close-up shot of the sun’s outer edge, wrapped around its solar panels. The video was accelerated from 1800x to 3600x, to show how things move on the interstellar center of the solar system.
The pioneers of social networking sites revealed their astonishment at what they saw in the video. And one of them said, “I’m fascinated by this…it’s cool…”.
Another commented, “It’s really amazing to have this level of detail on your budget in your own backyard.”
And this isn’t the first time McCarthy has impressed us with his amazing photos of outer space. In fact, he has previously used his solar telescope to take several pictures of the sun. Most recently, 150,000 images were fused together to create a 300-megapixel image of the sun, and also provided an amazing look at the sun.
It is noteworthy that pointing a telescope at the sun to capture such scenes can be considered the risk of melting the eyeball if you look through it. As such, it requires specially built telescopes to view the sun at this capacity.
Despite these risks, photographers like McCarthy are able to give us rare glimpses like this video of the sun.