The incandescent sun as you've never seen it before - picture, video

Bono might well have been happy to go blind by staring at the sun (which probably explains the U2 man's ridiculous shades), but it's not usually possible to gawp at the beauty of the most important star.

This newly-released image from NASA changes all that. Captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, the effects of processing can show some of the structures usually obscured by the sun's blinding light.



The original frames feature the 171 Angstrom wavelength of extreme ultraviolet, which shows plasma in the solar atmosphere.

Known as the corona, the temperature of this plasma is around 600,000 Kelvin and its loops are held in place by magnetic fields.

These loops are concentrated in active regions where the field is strongest, and they usually appear visibly as sunspots.

Want some more? Well, the people at NASA have made a wonderful video representing 24 hours of activity on September 25, 2011.