Inouye Solar Telescope Captures Its First Image of Sunspot

An image of a sunspot captured by NSF’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope clearly shows the potential of the telescope and its set of state-of-the-art instruments to revolutionize solar astronomy.

NSF’s 4-m Inouye Solar Telescope, the largest optical solar telescope in the world, is located on the island of Maui in Hawai’i.

The telescope delivers spatial resolution and sensitivity that enable astronomers to unravel many of the mysteries that the Sun presents, including the origin of solar magnetism, the mechanisms of coronal heating and drivers of the solar wind, flares and coronal mass ejections.

Continued...
Source

Image credit: NSO / AURA / NSF

This image of a sunspot was taken on January 28, 2020 by NSF’s Inouye Solar Telescope’s Wave Front Correction context viewer. The image reveals striking details of the sunspot’s structure as seen at the Sun’s surface.

The sunspot is sculpted by a convergence of intense magnetic fields and hot gas boiling up from below. This image uses a warm palette of red and orange, but the context viewer took this sunspot image at the wavelength of 530 nm — in the greenish-yellow part of the visible spectrum.

Source / Image Courtesy

The Wave Front Correction context viewer camera at the NSF’s Inouye Solar Telescope recorded this movie of a sunspot on January 28, 2020. The 2000 by 2000-pixel camera captured this sequence at wavelength of 530 nanometers.

The field of view is about 25 arcseconds square or about 12,000 miles across. This short movie compresses about one-and-a-half minutes of viewing into just a few seconds to highlight the evolution of small-scale structures known as penumbral grains and umbral dots.