It’s filled with million-degree ionized gas, or plasma, so hot that the light it emits is mainly at X-ray and extreme-ultraviolet wavelengths. The corona surrounds the visible surface of the Sun. The representative-color images were made from observations of ultraviolet light at a wavelength of 19.3 nanometers (25 times shorter than the wavelength of visible light). Hi-C flew on a sounding rocket and only took data for about five minutes, so the view switches back to AIA data at the end. ![]() About three seconds in, the view switches to super-high-resolution photos of the same region from NASA’s High Resolution Coronal Imager. It begins with images from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on board NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Video: This time-lapse movie shows activity in the sun’s corona on July 11, 2012, with 10 minutes compressed into 10 seconds. Understanding the Sun’s activity and its effects on Earth’s environment was the critical scientific objective of Hi-C, which provided unprecedented views of the dynamic activity and structure in the solar atmosphere. “Even though this mission was only a few minutes long, it marks a big breakthrough in coronal studies,” said Smithsonian astronomer Leon Golub (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), one of the lead investigators on the mission. The Hi-C telescope provides five times more detail than the next-best observations by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. The 16-megapixel images were captured by NASA’s High Resolution Coronal Imager, or Hi-C, which was launched on a sounding rocket on July 11th. Today, astronomers are releasing the highest-resolution images ever taken of the Sun’s corona, or million-degree outer atmosphere, in an extreme-ultraviolet wavelength of light. Hi-C launched on a sounding rocket on Jin a flight that lasted about 10 minutes. Both images show a portion of the sun’s surface roughly 85,000 by 50,000 miles in size. These photos of the solar corona, or million-degree outer atmosphere, show the improvement in resolution offered by NASA’s High Resolution Coronal Imager, or Hi-C (bottom), versus the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (top).
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