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2024-03-04 13:11:28
The Argentine photographer Eduardo Schaberger Poupeau, who has also been a fan of astronomy since childhood, has been trending in recent hours for an incredible photo he took of the Sun.
“I was able to capture an incredible event: an explosion that launched a jet of plasma more than 200,000 kilometers high, from the south pole of the Sun,” he celebrated on his networks.
“It was a wonderful show”
To obtain this photograph – in detail, in the video – the instruments used by Eduardo traveled the 150 million kilometers that separate the Earth from the Sun.
If we seek greater precision, the counter should take Rafaela as a starting point, the Santa Fe city where this 50-year-old photographer, an astronomy enthusiast since his childhood, resides.
“This passion began when I was a boy of 11 or 12 years old. And I began to combine it with photography around 2007, when McNaught passed by, an impressive comet that could be seen with the naked eye. It was then when I relived all this that I had never lost, but that I was not exercising,” says Schaberger Poupeau in conversation with TN.
The interview
– That incredible jet that we see coming out of the Sun in the photo, was it visible to the naked eye?
– No. We see that column of plasma when we look at the Sun with adequate protection, for example those glasses used to see eclipses, or with a welding mask, which by the way is not entirely advisable. What we see is the Sun’s photosphere, a layer of the solar atmosphere. But all of these events happen in the chromosphere, which is a thinner, less bright layer above that layer. So it cannot be seen with the naked eye because, we would say in a way, the great light that the photosphere has does not allow it. It can only be seen with specific solar telescopes, which are useless for anything else. That way you can see the entire chromosphere of the Sun, these plasma ejections, filaments on its surface. You can see a whole texture that looks like little hairs.
– Are these telescopes accessible?
– The one I used for this particular photo has very high precision filters, which are extremely difficult to make and that is why they are also very expensive equipment. To that we have to add all the cameras that are being used now. The sensors are increasingly of better quality. For example, in a photo session that sometimes lasts two hours or more, where I am photographing the Sun at different wavelengths, I can collect 400 gigabytes of information. Then, processing that requires very powerful computer equipment to be able to handle that volume of information.
At the end of the note he explained: “A technique called “lucky imaging” is applied, which would be something like lucky imaging, where astronomical cameras are used that are very fast in capturing many frames per second. I make small video sequences of very high quality. I’m trying to be lucky, in quotes, that some of those frames coincide with moments of very good stability in the atmosphere, which happen in fractions of a second. Then, with special software, all those images that were captured are analyzed and stacked to reduce the digital noise generated by the sensors. That way, I have an image that I then finish processing to give it a little more sharpness.”
-Your recent photograph had a great impact…
– Recognition is very gratifying, because I do this more than anything out of passion and to share it with people. These are things that sometimes you don’t know that the Sun, which is something you see every day, these things may be happening. So I find it very interesting to be able to share it, not only to surprise you that this exists, but to awaken interest in science and astronomy.
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