Miguel Claro is a professional photographer, author and science communicator based in Lisbon, Portugal, who creates spectacular images of the night sky. As a European Southern Observatory Photo Ambassador and member of The World At Night and the official astrophotographer of the Dark Sky Alqueva Reserve, he specializes in astronomical “Skyscapes” that connect both Earth and the night sky.Â
Feel the power of the sun in this incredible new timelapse of solar activity.
Astrophotographer Miguel Claro of Lisbon, Portugal captured the entire full disc of the sun on Oct. 12, 2023, showing the sun streaking towards its maximum of activity in its 11-year solar cycle.
The new video, Claro wrote on his website, is “showing a lot of interesting features in motion, such as eruptive prominences, filaments, active regions with minor flares, small spicules dancing like hair in the wind, and a delicate waved line of plasma,” Claro wrote.
The video shows the sun rotating over three hours with the plasma trapped in the sun’s strong magnetic fields hundreds of miles (or kilometers) above the surface, Claro said, “until it (the plasma) has been released into space in a blink of an eye.”
Claro captured the timelapse from a dark sky site in Portugal’s Alqueva Dark Sky Reserve using a Player One Saturn-M SQR camera and a Lunt telescope LS100. The video was compressed from three terabytes of raw data. “The final result is a 5K high resolution solar movie comprising 246 images over the course of about 3 hours,” he said.
To see more of Miguel Claro’s work, please see his website or follow his stories on Instagram at www.instagram.com/miguel_claro .
Editor’s Note: If you snap your own photos of the sun or night sky and would like to share them with Space.com’s readers, send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.