Astrophotographer Jason Kurth traveled to southern Utah with 200 pounds of gear, including a custom solar telescope, to capture the October 2023 annular eclipse. This ultra-high resolution time-lapse video, created from almost 2,000 images, is the result.
An annular eclipse is a celestial event in which the moon passes between Earth and the Sun, leaving our star’s outer edges visible. The phenomenon creates a ring-like appearance known as the “ring of fire.”
At first glance, it looks like the dark circle passes slowly over a stunning yet static image of the sun, but when the video zooms in, the spicules of the chromosphere and prominences of the photosphere come alive with luminous ripples and pulsations.
Kurth’s 8K eclipse time-lapse took a few hours to capture, over a year to plan, and “a newly built 24-core workstation with 192 gigabytes of RAM to handle processing the data.” At My Modern Met, Kurth posits: “I don’t believe any annular eclipse has been captured in this much detail before.”
Jason Kurth goes by @frozen.spectrum on Instagram.
Related reading from astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy: Capturing Our Star, a guide on the mechanics (and safety precautions) of solar astronomy.
Watch these sun and eclipse videos next:
• What are the different types of eclipses?
• Why did eclipses used to be terrifying?
• How do solar storms happen?
• Hisako Koyama, the woman who stared at the sun
• The sun, our closest star, in a stunning 4K time lapse animation
Plus: The 2017 Solar Eclipse from the shores of Palisades Reservoir, Idaho.
via Kottke.
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