'This image covers an area 8,200 x 8,200 km (5,000 x 5,000 miles, 11 x 11 arcseconds).' -- Credit: NSO/AURA/NSF
The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope has produced high-resolution images that show the Sun in 'unprecedented detail,' according to an announcement from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The telescope is located close to the summit of Maui's Haleakala volcano. Each of the 'cell-like structures' visible in the images and video are approximately as large as Texas, according to NSF.
Understanding the Sun is an important step toward improving space weather forecasts, which will help humanity anticipate potentially disruptive events. The Inouye Solar Telescope is a key tool that will shed light on a number of the Sun's mysteries. According to the NSF, having hours of advanced notice about potential space weather events will give officials time to put satellites and important infrastructure like power grids into safe mode.
The Inouye Solar Telescope features a massive 4m (13ft) mirror and more than 11km (7 miles) of piping as part of the cooling system that protects the telescope and its optics. The NSF explains that Inouye feature's adaptive optics designed with an off-axis mirror placement that compensates for the blur that would otherwise result from the Earth's atmosphere.
Astrophysicist and cosmologist Katie Mack chimed in on the above video, sharing a fun little anecdote about how the forces at work on the sun can be seen here on Earth in everyday life:
Here’s convection happening in a bowl of miso soup. Compare with gif above depicting THE FRICKIN’ SUN pic.twitter.com/SagHXqoBjr
Ultimately, the Inouye Solar Telescope has the largest aperture of any solar telescope in the world, according to director Thomas Rimmele. The first half-decade of the telescope's operation is expected to produce more solar data than humanity has generated in the past few hundred years.
Yes, if you consider the primary + secondary mirror pair to be the "telescope", it's about F/13. But it has several more mirrors that redirect the light to the science instruments. Where the light enters the science instrument, the beam is collimated, so the f-stop is undefined.
Just tell them that the telescope has optics that allow the sensor to capture at least 15 megapixels and their 100 megapixels camera are fixed with a lens that allows the sensor to capture about 5 megapixels. I'm eager to see their faces......
It's plasma - the convective cells of which look like they're "boiling" due to the convective currents of the plasma columns. Looks like molten gold to me...
Fixed lens cameras, also known as point and shoot cameras, don't always get the respect they deserve. Today we are looking at the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, one of the most expensive of the breed. The Inouye has no direct competitors, so we will compare it to the Nikon Coolpix P1000.
Focal length: The Inouye wins here. The Nikon has focal length of 24 to 3000mm (FF equiv.), whereas the Inouye has a focal length of 50,000mm (FF equiv.).
Color: The Nikon might seem to be the winner here since it is a color camera and the Inouye is black and white. But the the Inouye takes black and white to a hole new level. It supports in-camera filters to let you change the look of the image. Furthermore, the camera has two image sensors, and you can use different filters for each one. (A splitter mirror is used to direct the image on both sensors.) The images from the two sensors can then be combined to generate false colors.
Atmospheric distortion correction: Temperature differentials in the atmosphere cause light to bend. This can cause image quality problems at longer focal lengths on the Nikon, whereas the Inouye has adaptive optics to correct this distortion.
Sensor resolution: The Inouye's 16 MP sensor marginally beats the 15.9 MP on the Nikon. 16 MP may seem small, but the reality of the point and shoot world is that the lenses aren't sharp enough for anything above 16 MP to bring much benefit.
Sensor aspect ratio: The Nikon has an 4:3 aspect ratio. The Inouye makes a bid for the Instagram generation with a square sensor.
Panoramas: Both cameras support multi-shot panoramas, but the Inouye can do this totally automatically, because the image circle produced by the lens is large enough to take a 3x3 panorama without changing where the camera is pointed. Sadly, the Inouye takes 28.8 seconds to shoot a 3x3 panorama.
Low light performance: This is the bane of most point and shoots, including the two considered here. The Nikon has a clear victory, with Inouye requiring direct sunlight to produce a good result.
Hand held shooting: The Nikon is excellent at this, whereas the weight and lack of image stablization make handheld shooting impractical with the Inouye.
Continuous shooting: The Nikon is limited to 7 FPS, and has a 7 frame buffer. The Inouye easily beats this, shooting at 30 FPS with a 100,000 frame buffer.
Minimum focus distance: The Nikon can focus as close as 30 cm. The minimum focus distance of 147,000,000 km makes the Inouye useless for closeup work.
Recommendations: The Inouye is has impressive reach, and pushes the state of the art with features like compensation for atmospheric distortion. Never the less, when we look at common use cases, the camera falls short. Travelers will prefer the Nikon because of it's smaller size and weight. The continuous shooting abilities of the Inouye might seem to commend it to sports photographers, but ultimately the lack of a zoom lens and the poor low light performance disqualify it. Possibly astronomers are a target market for this camera, but again the poor low light performance is crippling. The Nikon can shoot credible pictures of the moon, whereas the only celestial object that the Inouye can photograph is the sun.
If you really need the reach of the Inouye, then you should consider it. But for most photographers, the Nikon P1000 offers the better value.
I was debating between these two but after reading your review have decided on the Nikon. The Inouye certainly appears to be a one-trick pony. Thanks :)
The minimum focusing distance make the X-Pro3's "hidden" LCD screen a laughing point of complaint here. Best not tell anyone of the typical whingers within these chambers aye?
Talk about getting things into perspective, right? ;-)
Would an array of 289 P1000's (17x17) pointed at the same object and having the images combined in software to maximize resolution be able to achieve a similar result to a 50,000mm equivalent when cropped?
@Kenneth Almquist: > “Minimum focus distance: The Nikon can focus as close as 30 cm. The minimum focus distance of 147,000,000 km makes the Inouye useless for closeup work.”
Wait a second! Did you consider depth of focus at the minimal focus distance?!
> “the only celestial object that the Inouye can photograph is the sun”
I think this is a great misrepresentation. Are you sure that the sensor does not have EFCS, to make longer exposures possible?
> “the reality of the point and shoot world is that the lenses aren't sharp enough for anything above 16 MP to bring much benefit.”
I mean so much as white being a bunch of colors thrown together then sure, yeah, it's white. I don't think it's wrong though to say it's yellow though. By classification, it is a main sequence star which, by star standards, lean a little yellow.
Look at https://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/crosseyed.shtml. The first, blue pair has the most prominent effect to my eyes. BTW 90 million miles is the Earth's distance from the Sun, divided by 30 makes "just" 3 million miles...
"... Sun continues to 'burn' hydrogen into helium in its core, the core slowly collapses and heats up, causing the outer layers of the Sun to grow larger. This has been going on since soon after the Sun was formed 4.5 billion years ago."
This is the absolute cause of global warming. Sun is getting bigger larger soon gobbling planets and edging closer to Earth. If we do not evolve we're fried.
That's not true actually. The current state of global warming is caused by humans. We burned fossil fuels that were accumulating for hundreds millions of years in fifty years. But on bigger scale yes, in 500 000 000 years the earth will be burned by sun. I don't think that at this point humanity will still exist. AI is evolving. Dying doesn't make sense if you are curious. A lot of science disciplines are just too much for one live. Like quantum mechanics or biology. It's interesting what will happen to the society, cause it's based on instincts. Without them societies doesn't make sense anymore.
You should more worry about this. Happy Friday!!! :) "A recent revelation by NASA explains how on July 23, 2012, Earth had a near miss with a solar flare, or coronal mass ejection (CME), from the most powerful storm on the sun in over 150 years, but nobody decided to mention it."
>97% of World scientists say Global Warming is caused by Humans, but the people responsible for it shove out a bunch of fake news and people line up to side with them... kinda depressing really.
Still, on the same topic as the article, if the Star Betelgeuse exploded about 650 years ago (it will at some point and is behaving oddly right now) the show could start real soon... should throw shadows at night... perhaps really soon in Human terms, or just in Astronomical terms...
The sun is not getting larger. At least not in a relevant timescale. Global warming is a phenominon of the industrial era. The sun has been the same size for like 4.5 billion years and will be the same size for another like 5+ billion years.
Eventually, the ratio of hydrogen to helium will change so it will start to swell into a red giant (which will be about as big as to fill in the orbit of mars) but that's not the cause of global warming. It will be the cause of the destruction of the earth in all likelihood but that's a long way away. Longer than the age of the earth.
The sun is getting BRIGHTER though, which could spell disaster eventually. It's brightening about 1% over the next 100 million years so the earth might indeed be a little smudge warmer since the time of the dinosaurs due to increased solar radiance but certainly not since the 1900s.
Edgar_in_Indy no, but CO2 is a greenhouse gas. As far as I know the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is at it's highest level ever. We don't realize how much fires are everywhere. Every car is a fire, every heating radiator and air conditioning. We don't see those fires that burn inside mechanisms so we think that everything is OK. I'm not sure if people realize how much problems it'll bring but we'll find out soon, cause I'm sure people are too arrogant and greedy so they'll burn everything they can to make some money from it. In my northern city 20 years ago there were at least 3 feet of snow in January and now the grass is green.
Jeff Greenberg I don't think that it's possible to reanimate dead body. And I'm sure they don't know it it's possible too. But wishful thinking at it's highest level eventually will make you a customer of this company ;)
That's entirely untrue: https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ "The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is extremely likely (greater than 95 percent probability) to be the result of human activity since the mid-20th century and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented over decades to millennia."
This is a plain lie - "Dr_Jon >97% of World scientists say Global Warming is caused by Humans...". There is no such topic in the science! This scam is distributed usual from pseudo theoretical physics and some biologist because perfectly fit with their atheism and new edge spiritualism/shamanism. But nothing common with science! Just sci-fi philosophy and occultism in scientific wear. And yes there are such people everywhere including NASA. You will notice them by their screams about global warnings and all kind of theories that if we all just follow there will be no death and sickness. Exactly people like these created fascism, communism and now liberal "freedom".
If you're suggesting I'm saying something untrue just google what I said.
As NASA was mentioned we can have: https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/ "Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree." "In addition, most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position."
U.S. National Academy of Sciences "Scientists have known for some time, from multiple lines of evidence, that humans are changing Earth’s climate, primarily through greenhouse gas emissions."
U.S. Global Change Research Program "Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities."
99% percent of scientists in Germany during fascism agreed that Germans are Aryan race and Jews and east races are "untermenshen". Nothing very different during communism - science was and it is fully involved. Now we have psychologist, philosophers and medics explaining for many types of genders and swapping sex with operations as child play . Again university and science involved. Also we have scientist and medics explaining how unborn baby is just bunch of cells - the most complex living being ever known! At same time we are investing billions to look for single and simple cell in outer space or different planets. Again science involved. Do you get my point? There are so many scientist finding and proving global warming is absolute nonsense but there are billions $ involved. For all kind of funds to fight it that some scientist will have no need to do something else with generations. And yet their predictions and their models fail time after time.
Equator is hotter than somewhere in Iceland because it is closer to the sun. How close is the equator compared to Iceland in kilometers? What is the difference in distance?
There are times science is selective so as not to scare people like effects of smoking. Never in the news bartenders died of smoking back then when they were exposed to 2nd hand smoke constantly incessantly for 8-hour shift.
"Equator is hotter than somewhere in Iceland because it is closer to the sun." No, it is hotter as it pretty much faces the sun, while Iceland is at quite an angle so the Sun's light/heat gets spread out more. This is amplified by the Earth's tilt in Winter. The difference in distance is way too small to matter.
Dr Jon said "...Iceland is at quiet an angle ... " and "The difference in distance is way too small to matter". The 2nd quote makes sense but the first one ?
Think of shining a fairly narrow circle of light on a Basketball, if you shine it on the nearest part you get a small circle of light. If you don't move but aim at the top of the curve the light gets spread out over a greater area. So it won't be as bright (or warm if you were shining a heat ray).
Also note the Earth's orbit is elliptical, not circular, the difference in distance from the Sun that makes (as we go round each year) is enormously more (about 3.1M miles) than anything due to where you are on Earth. (Closest is 91.4M miles, furthest is 94.5M miles, or 147/152 M km.) The Earth is 12,742 km across (varies a little bit).
The NIH alone spends $30 billion dollars a year on medical research, and we still haven't cured cancer. This whole telescope cost about $0.3 billion total.
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