I took this image in the section dedicated to space discoveries of London's Science Museum.
The photograph shows pictures taken by the NASA spacecraft called Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).
The SOHO spacecraft carries several instruments that provide graphic images of the Sun at different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. These allow us to study various aspects of the Sun. The false-colour images help our eyes distinguish different features.
For example in the first image a bright solar flare shows as a white burst when captured by SOHO's extreme-ultraviolet imaging telescope (May 1998) while in the second a huge loop in the Sun's magnetic field on the right side of the Sun's disc is captured by SOHO's telescope.
In the next picture SOHO's Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) instrument reveals a huge group of sunspots to the north of the Sun's equatorial region (imagine that the sunspot area would cover the entire surface of the Earth more than 13 times – fascinating).
The fourth image indicates instead a loop of prominence of solar plasma – 30 times the size of the Earth and the last one was instead produced by SOHO's large-angle and spectrometric coronagraph instrument and shows four planets and the Sun's outer atmosphere or corona.
The serial quality of the images in this sequence made me think about some of the energetic colours in Raf Simon's Spring/Summer 2012 collection and in particular about his sleeveless leather tops matched with tailored trousers or suits characterised by slim lines and clean silhouettes or the sweaters with diagonal rows of hibiscuses in bright colours.
For more solar inspiration check out the video embedded at the end of this post about Nasa's Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO - or download further Sun-related images here).
The third mission in NASA's Solar Terrestrial Probes program (STP), STEREO was launched in October 2006 and has since then been tracing the flow of energy and matter from the Sun to Earth, providing unique views of the Sun-Earth System like the 3-D structure of coronal mass ejections and violent eruptions of matter from the Sun.
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