Looking directly at the sun is a bad idea. That’s something that almost everyone learns from a very early age. Even when the sun is mostly blocked by an eclipse, you need to have special glasses on to make sure your eyes aren’t damaged by looking at our bright star. For some people, however, their whole job is looking directly at the sun (through specialized telescopes) to learn more about it.

The Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) is a location where this is done using a powerful telescope called the Goode Solar Telescope (GST). This telescope has long been able to capture great images of the sun, helping scientists to learn more about it. Since it is an Earth based telescope, however, it was unable to get the clearest pictures of the sun’s corona because of the distortion caused by our atmosphere. This meant that the teams working with the equipment couldn’t get resolutions better than 1000 kilometers (621 miles) above it. While still impressive, it wasn’t good enough. Also, the challenge of improving those resolutions has been difficult to overcome, with very little improvements coming for over 80 years.

A recent upgrade, however, has really helped a lot. They installed an upgrade that allows the telescope to see down to just 63 kilometers, which is incredible. The technology used is known as adaptive optics, and it helps to compensate for the atmospheric distortions that the telescope is looking through.

BBSO Optical Engineer and Chief Observer, Nicolas Gorceix talked about this upgrade in a statement, saying:

“The turbulence in the air severely degrades images of objects in space, like our Sun, seen through our telescopes. But we can correct for that. Adaptive optics is like a pumped-up autofocus and optical image stabilization in your smartphone camera, but correcting for the errors in the atmosphere rather than the user’s shaky hands.”

This type of technology has been around for over two decades now, and has been widely used in night-time astronomy. Until now, the technology couldn’t be applied to telescopes studying the edge of the sun. Thomas Rimmele is an NSO Chief Technologist and the person who built the very first adaptive optics for the sun’s surface. He explained in the statement:

“The new coronal adaptive optics system closes this decades-old gap and delivers images of coronal features at 63 kilometers resolution—the theoretical limit of the 1.6-meter Goode Solar Telescope.”

This upgrade is now in use and has allowed the researchers to capture images and video like never before. One of the most impressive things released so far is a video of plasma ‘raindrops’ that were ejected from the surface of the sun falling back down. The video also shows the surface edge of the sun in detail never seen before with stunning jagged edges that show the sun’s texture. Check out the video here:

That is not at all what I expected the surface of the sun to look like. This new technology is incredible.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a second giant hole has opened up on the sun’s surface. Here’s what it means.