If you, like me, live out of the path of last Sunday’s annular eclipse, this timelapse video, posted to YouTube by high school science teacher and photographer Cory Poole of Redding, California, may be the next-best thing to actually being there. It’s even got a nice synthesizer-heavy backing track which reminds me of the better music from those wonderful 80s-produced science and nature videos I grew up watching.
Cory shot the 700 still frames that make up the video through a solar telescope and using a filter that allows you to see details of the sun’s chromosphere. (The chromosphere is the layer of the sun where solar prominences, gigantic gas plumes which are related to solar flares, are most easily seen.)
The filter works by admitting only a very narrow spectrum of light which is characteristic of the chromosphere, close to just a single wavelength–the wavelength of light emitted by the sun’s hydrogen atoms when their electrons go from their 2nd excited state to their 1st, a nice reddish color.
I still would have liked to have seen it, but this is a pretty nice consolation. Maybe next eclipse…
[Cory Poole on YouTube via Gizmodo]
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