Five years into its mission, Solar Orbiter stuns again with this detailed view of the Sun. What you see is the Sun’s million-degree hot atmosphere, called the corona, as it looks in ultraviolet light.
Dive in and explore the hot plasma (charged particles) caught in the Sun’s messy magnetic field. Can you spot the glowing coronal loops around active regions, and the darker, cooler filaments and prominences?
Obtaining such a detailed image is no easy feat. On 9 March 2025, at around 77 million km from the Sun, the Solar Orbiter spacecraft was oriented to point to different regions across the Sun in a 5 x 5 grid. At each pointing direction, the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument captured six images at high resolution and two wide-angle views.
The image you see here combines a whopping 200 individual images into the widest high-resolution view of the Sun yet. (See previous full Sun views here.)
Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA. The Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument is led by the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB).
[Image description: The Sun looks like a warm yellow sphere with a surface covered with glowing messy hair. The yellow glow extends to the edges of the image, with some regions brighter than others. Many bright yellow arcs stick out from a wide band around the Sun’s equator. A darker region stands out across a roughly horizontal line near the Sun’s south pole. The bright arcs and some darker material can also be seen around the Sun’s edges.]
[Technical details: This large image was assembled from images taken between 13:06 and 17:31 UTC (14:06–18:31 CET) on 9 March 2025 by Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager at a wavelength of 17.4 nanometres. Solar Orbiter was viewing the Sun from a latitude 11.4° below the equator at a distance of around 77 million km. The final image is 12544 x 12544 pixels in size, corresponding 6171.6 x 6171.6 arc seconds or 2325.5 x 2325.5 million km. The Sun, which has a diameter of 1.4 million km, spans around 7505 pixels and 3692.6 arc seconds.]
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