The European Solar Orbiter spacecraft sent a unique image of the Sun, it has 83 million pixels – ČT24 – Czech Television

The images were taken when the Solar Orbiter was about 75 million kilometers from the Sun, about halfway between our world and its parent star. The high-resolution EUI telescope captures images with such high spatial resolution that a mosaic of 25 individual images is required to cover the entire Sun at such a short distance.

The whole film was created gradually. It was taken over four hours because it takes approximately 10 minutes to scan each area, including how long the probe travels from one segment to another.

In total, the resulting image contains more than 83 million pixels in a grid of 9148 x 9112 pixels. By comparison, this image has ten times better resolution than a 4K TV screen. The full size image is then available for download HEREmá 56 MB.

Sun observer goals

After two years of flight, the Solar Orbiter reached a point about one-third of the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Now the spacecraft will move in an elliptical orbit that will not change much and will reach the point closest to the Sun every six months. The next flight in October will reach the Sun at a distance of 42 million kilometers, the DPA agency said.

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Weighing 1.8 tons, the probe carries ten instruments to study solar activity, eruptions and find out what causes the solar wind and how a coronal magnetic field is created. He also has to take the first pictures of the sun’s poles. It carries ten instruments, and teams of Czech scientists and engineers also took part in the preparation of four of them. In the Czech Republic, for example, mirrors were created for the METIS telescope, which is designed for observation and spectroscopy of the solar corona.

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