It looks like Halloween has come early this year. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center recently released a photo of the sun from Oct. 8 that looks eerily like a jack-o'-lantern.
But it doesn't really look like one of the pumpkins you used to carve a "scary" face into and stick a candle in. If you saw a jack-o'-lantern that looked like this hanging around your neighborhood on Halloween night, you would promptly stop trick-or-treating and run back into your house to hide under the covers in a fetal position until it went away.
Well done, Sun. You truly look like something out of a horror movie.
Scientists at NASA got this ghoulish image by combining several images of active regions on the sun. "The active regions appear brighter because those are areas that emit more light and energy — markers of an intense and complex set of magnetic fields hovering in the sun's atmosphere, the corona," according to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
The composite image includes two sets of wavelengths at 171 and 193 Angstroms that usually appear gold and yellow in color. This is what makes the photo of the sun look like a big, old jack-o'-lantern in the sky.
Though our eyes see the sun as yellow because it is the brightest wavelength from the sun, it actually emits light in all colors. NASA uses special instruments, such as ground-based or space-based telescopes to see the sun in different wavelengths not visible to the naked eye, which is how the agency gets those photos of the sun in all different kinds of colors.
