Amateur astrophotography is becoming increasingly popular with the astronomy community as advances in telescopes and camera technology allow people from all walks of life to observe the sky in stunning detail, including our own Sun, albeit with the appropriate protective equipment.

This has been lately showed Andrew McCarthy (Twitter @AJamesMcCarthy), originally from Northern California but currently residing in Florence, Arizona, owns and operates Cosmic Background Studios.

While the feature doesn’t seem that big, McCarthy provides a video showing the gigantic size of this tornado-like beast. But while hurricanes are a common occurrence on Earth, what’s going on on the Sun’s surface to create such a unique phenomenon?

“It’s a solar bulge in the Sun’s chromosphere,” McCarthy recently told Universe Today. “The mass of plasma captured by the magnetic loop pulls it more than a hundred thousand miles from the photosphere into space. Solar material “rains” back to the Sun from the bulge.

McCarthy says Universe TodayHe says this sequence was imaged using hundreds of thousands of images over several hours, using a modified telescope that can observe the Sun’s atmosphere in the so-called alpha hydrogen band, and that it’s not an accidental encounter. Sun’s daily behavior.

“Each frame of the video was a stack of about 500 individual images,” McCarthy told Universe Today. “The feature was relatively faint against the background of the much brighter solar disk, so determining contrast against the flare was otherwise difficult.”

Along with the video, McCarthy collaborated with colleague Jason Ganzel (Twitter). @TheVastReaches ) to create a breathtaking 140-megapixel still image of the Sun with the tornado visible at the top of the image. The image “has a dramatic view of the chromosphere and solar corona,” McCarthy told Universe Today.

McCarthy mentions several layers of the Sun, including the solar projection, chromosphere, photosphere, and corona. Because although the Sun appears to be a uniform structure on the surface, it contains layers just like the Earth and other celestial bodies.