Zoom of the Sun

Zoom of the Sun from full disk to 0.1 arcsecond (70 km) resolution. The full disk image comes from the MDI instrument onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite, the high resolution end image comes from the Swedish Solar Telescope (SST) on La Palma. This high resolution image was taken in the G-band filter on May 25 2003 at 11:22:32 UT by the Oslo group (Mats Carlsson, Astrid Fossum, Viggo Hansteen, Elin Marthinussen, Luc Rouppe van der Voort) and is one of the sharpest images ever taken of the Sun. The image is a combination of three images using Multi Frame Blind Deconvolution but even the raw images before deconvolution are diffraction limited over most of the field of view. The zoom goes through an intermediate resolution image from MDI. The seamless zoom was achieved by smoothly interpolating between the three input images during the zoom. The axes are in arcseconds. Image processing by Mats Carlsson.

Quicktime movie (highest resolution) (11 MB)

Quicktime movie (highest resolution), faster zoom, (10 MB)

MPEG movie (10 MB)