Home / Photography / Astrophotography

Breathtaking Timelapse Captures How the Sun Looks During Intense Solar Storms

By Regina Sienra on December 3, 2023

Ver esta publicación en Instagram

Una publicación compartida por Miguel Claro Astrophotography (@miguel_claro)

Solar storms are one of the most fascinating astronomical events. These magnetic eruptions remind us that the surface of our sun is anything but static. It is also thanks to this phenomenon that we get to experience the Northern Lights. A few weeks ago, Miguel Claro, a Portugal-based astrophotographer, captured the sun as it approached its maximum activity in its 11-year solar cycle. The result is a mesmerizing timelapse that shows the dance of the solar flares.

“On the 12th of October 2023, I took a solar timelapse of an entire full disc of the sun, showing a lot of interesting features in motion, such as eruptive prominences, filaments, active regions with minor flares, small spicules dancing like hair in the wind, and a delicate waved line of plasma floating hundreds of kilometers above the sun’s surface, stuck by the strong magnetic fields, until has been released into space in a blink of an eye,” writes Claro.

The astrophotographer explains that the video shows the chromosphere while the sun is rotating over the course of three hours. “The timelapse sequence was captured from Dark Sky Alqueva territory with a Player One Saturn-M SQR camera and a Lunt telescope LS100, generating three terabytes of data,” he adds. “The final result is a 5K high-resolution solar movie comprising 246 images over the course of about three hours, between UT 11:05 and UT 14:08.” Claro is no stranger to capturing the sun's striking beauty. Before this timelapse, he shared some still images of the sun, a unique take on the latest annular eclipse, and a virtual reality VR360° of the Earth's star based on one of his images.

Follow Claro on Instagram so you never miss an update, and be sure to visit Claro's website to support his work and buy a print of his images.