Hawaii’s Solar Telescope Captures Extraordinary New Images of the Sun – NBC Bay Area

The photos give a remarkable view of sunspots and plasma on the sun’s surface, with patterns resembling honeycomb and flames

A solar telescope perched on the summit of Haleakalā, the dormant volcano on the Hawaiian island of Maui, captured new granular images of the sun, unlike any seen before.

The solar images were released Thursday by the National Solar Observatory, showing bright orange sunspots on the sun’s surface, known as the photosphere.

“Complex sunspots or groups of sunspots can be the source of explosive events like flares and coronal mass ejections that generate solar storms,” the observatory said.

Sunspots can often be the size of Earth itself, or larger, and are found in areas with strong magnetic fields, the observatory says.

“These energetic and eruptive phenomena influence the outermost atmospheric layer of the Sun, the heliosphere, with the potential to impact Earth and our critical infrastructure,“ the observatory said.

The photos were captured by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, the most powerful ground-based telescope in the world.  …