New Technology Leads to Better and More Detailed Photos of the Sun Sara Whitbeck Physics 1 Fall 2002

On November 14 th the royal Swedish academy of sciences, awarder of the noble prize, released new photos of the sun taken on July 15 of this year. These are the most detailed pictures of the sun taken up to this time.

The photos were taken using a ground-based telescope recently installed in La Palma in the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa.

How is it possible to get more detailed images from the ground? The photos taken by the Academy’s ground-based telescope are much more detailed then pictures taken by space telescopes, despite the blurring effects of the Earth’s atmosphere.

The telescope used by the Academy has an aperture of one meter. So far no one has been able to put a telescope of that size into space. The images produced by the telescope are clear because of adaptive optics, a system which bends and deforms mirrors to make up for the atmospheric blurring effect.

One telescope is not necessarily better then the other. Instead the ground-based and space-based telescopes compliment each other

NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) can capture ultraviolet images from the sun that cannot be photographed from the Earth’s surface. Picture taken by NASA’s SOHO showing three different energies of UV radiation combined.

Picture taken by NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory in space on the same day Picture taken by the Royal Swedish Academy of the Sciences ground- based telescope