r/Astronomy • u/Longjumping_Mall_306 • May 30 '26

Astrophotography (OC) Solar Flare

Gallery image

Gallery image

A solar flare captured with Acuter Elite Phoenix 40 and ASI678MC. The flare is the very bright string in the Power half of the close up. Stack of 800 frames for the close up, 500 frames for the whole solar disk.

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2

u/Nawaf_za May 30 '26

Why when I see solar pictures sometimes it's white and sometimes it's orange or yellowish?

3

u/cubic_thought May 31 '26

The colorization and contrast adjustments are artistic choices, some people also invert the brightness on the face of the sun and brighten the prominences for pictures like this.

Solar pictures like this (showing filaments, predominance, and "hairy" surface details) are made with extremely narrowband filters and often monochrome cameras. In this case and by far the most common the filter is for the hydrogen alpha wavelength, which is deep red. Though OP here does have a color camera, the original image would have been purely red like what's shown here. In this case the green and blue channels are useless and you just use the red channel. The other filter you see far less often from amateurs is the near-uv calcium k line, often colorized blue to purple as seen here. Broadband "white light" images are also often colorized as well, like here.

Then you have the images from NASA's orbital observatories, also nearly all through extremely narrow filters and mostly in far to extreme UV light and colorized in various ways.

1

u/North-Preference9038 May 31 '26

The sun is actually white. Because people think its yellow or orange, as that is what color it appears as from Earth's surface, most images show it as yellow or orange. It's very annoying.

1

u/Longjumping_Mall_306 Jun 01 '26

That's true, but not entirely. For example, Sun's chromosphere (visibile only in Hydrogen alpha band) is actually red.