NASA processes photos to uncover valuable data, but it generates some spectacular images

Oct 19, 2012 19:41 GMT  ·  By

Staring into the sun is considered bad for you by most people. Well, it is bad for you, unless you have a specific reason for doing it and the technology to do it safely.

That's not the case for most people, thankfully NASA is thinking about the rest of us mortals who don't have the means to marvel at the beauty of the closest star to our planet.

And beautiful it is, though as with everything else in our digital world, the video above does get more than a touch up in Photoshop. Well, not Photoshop technically, but the images have been processed and enhanced to get them to look like they do now.

"Watching a particularly beautiful movie of the sun helps show how the lines between science and art can sometimes blur," NASA explained.

"But there is more to the connection between the two disciplines: science and art techniques are often quite similar, indeed one may inform the other or be improved based on lessons from the other arena."

But this isn't about your visual enjoyment, it's about science, this is NASA after all. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory put some of the images it captured through what is called a gradient filter, to enhance the contrast on some of the elements.

The scope is to make it easier to make out what's going on, the complex phenomena happening on the sun's surface and above it, particularly the coronal loops created by solar material traveling along the paths of the sun's magnetic field.

"Observations of the loops, which can be more or less tangled and complex during different phases of the sun's 11-year activity cycle, can help researchers understand what's happening with the sun's complex magnetic fields, fields that can also power great eruptions on the sun such as solar flares or coronal mass ejections," it added.

But, while processing the images this way serves a scientific purpose, it's pretty obvious that what comes out are some spectacular images of our sun.