Europe’s largest solar telescope has obtained groundbreaking photos showing the beautiful composition of the sun. This photo captured at 430nm shows details of the sunspot, an area that appears darker on the surface of the sun as it is cooler than other parts around it.
The photos were taken by Telescope Gregor, operated by a German consortium and located at the Ted Observatory in Spain. Gregor recently received a major optical redesign from the Leibniz Institute for Solar Physics (KIS) that enabled the highest-resolution sun photos captured from Europe.
Here is a similar sunspot in motion:
Scientists also captured this photo at 516nm showing the structures of the solar magnetic field in ultra-high resolution:
This photo is similar to the one recently released by the National Solar Observatory in the US, which shot the most ever photographs of the sun’s surface using the 4-meter Inoi Solar Telescope on the island of Maui in Hawaii.
Gregor can find details about 31 miles (50 km) around the Sun, with a solar diameter of 865,370 miles (1.3927 million km). To put this into perspective, the Leibniz Institute explains that you can capture a very sharp photo of a needle on a soccer field from one kilometer (0.62 mm).
