Beautiful Photo Collage of the Sun Shows Different Wavelengths of Light

Our sun can look very different in photographs depending on the wavelength of light you’re trying to capture. Some photographs show the sun as a glowing white ball, while others capture hotter areas in a cold blue color. NASA recently took a collection of sun photos shot at different wavelengths and combined them into the beautiful photo collage seen above (here’s a higher-res version).

The photographs in the collage were all captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) — the same project that created the “3 years in 3 minutes” time-lapse of the sun that we shared back in April.

NASA says that the collage “shows how observations of the sun in different wavelengths helps highlight different aspects of the sun’s surface and atmosphere,” and that it also includes images created using instruments that measure magnetic and Doppler information.

Here are a few photos of the sun shot at different wavelengths. Notice how different they are from each other:

Want to create a similar collage yourself? Pay a visit to the SDO photo gallery to download the original photos that went into making it.

(via Wired via Doobybrain)

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Image credits: Photographs by NASA/SDO/GSFC