The sounds and sights of the Sun...

...a source of personal inspiration and fascination for many years now, as some of you know.


Here we have a 21MB video of various solar flares and solar prominences with an audio track supplied by the modulation of the solar emissions (I think). Startling. Entrancing. Brilliant. "Brilliant noise," indeed.

via Moon River: "See you in beautiful hell"

But wait!


"This picture is a false-color image of an X-17 solar flare on October 28, 2003 [22MB video link], made with SOHO's Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT). X-class flares are the most powerful category, capable of releasing the energy of a billion one-megaton nuclear bombs. The flare is the large, white area in the bottom half of the solar disk (the horizontal lines are an effect of the flare's intense light saturating the EIT instrument)."

That excerpt and image came from "Sunscapes," a post on Pruned that led to so much more: like this solar flare film, for example, which is literally one of hundreds of similarly stunning video and photo files on the TRACE website. And you're invited to download and burn all of the TRACE movies to disc. No, really, you are.



This last image is part of some Photoshop freestyling I did in 2000/2001 with solar-satellite imagery: "Solar Symphony in Nine Movements"...

...the source images having come from Solar Data Analysis Center.

Man, I feel a little breathless after all of this.