Utterly alien.
For reference, the field of view here is about 2.5x the diameter of the Earth. Astronomical scales remain mind bending to me.
What a time to be alive. I can look at my magic enchanted light-box and observe "rain" on the surface of the sun.
It's almost nice that mysteries remain - apparently, the physical mechanism behind solar spicules [1] remains "hotly" (!!) debated.
With NSO (not NSO.edu but the cyberweapons/malware company) there is a hidden tenuous pun.
Adaptive optics started in a secret space weaponry research funded by SDI.
When a few profs independently proposed the idea in their NSF research grant proposal they were told - we already know this stuff.
https://www.npr.org/2013/06/24/190986008/for-sharpest-views-...
This was beautiful!
They talk about creating an artificial star by stimulating light at 90km in the atmosphere, would it be useful to have a satellite that you can reposition that would shine a calibrated light source back at earth? I imagine you could also do some tricks with the light source to maybe get more accurate data about the atmospheric distortions.
If you like this, call your congressman.
What fascinates me is the stable structure in the first video. Everything is so ephemeral yet that structure remains largely in place and in the same shape yet it's internals are seething.
This is so exciting! My colleagues are doing research in astronomical imaging except on the more theoretical side of things - it's really neat to come across cool downstream applications like that!
“Clearest images to date” - wouldn’t images taken from space, much closer to the sun, be clearer?
Blocks evil Tor users.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-025-02564-0
The paper has more details. What's interesting to me is that the key innovation isn't the deformable mirror but rather the design of a wavefront sensor that focuses on coronal features (instead of the "grain" on the solar surface prior systems used).