Highest Resolution Images

The highest-resolution images ever taken of the Sun’s corona were just released by NASA. The solar corona is the million-degree or so outer atmosphere. The 16-megapixel images, taken in the extreme-ultraviolet wavelength of light, were captured by NASA’s High Resolution Coronal Imager,  which was launched on a sounding rocket on July 11th. The Hi-C telescope is capable of five times more detail than the next-best observations by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.
“Even though this mission was only a few minutes long, it marks a big breakthrough in coronal studies,” said Smithsonian astronomer Leon Golub (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), one of the lead investigators on the mission.
Understanding solar activity and how it affects Earth’s environment was the main scientific objective of Hi-C, “which provided unprecedented views of the dynamic activity and structure in the solar atmosphere.”