TRANSITION REGION AND CORONAL EXPLORER
MOST RECENT CORONAL IMAGE

This image is a picture of the Sun taken by the 1700A channel of the Transition Region and Coronal Explorer spacecraft. This particular image is a mosaic made up of many individual images of the chromosphere. Each image is produced by the emission of UV light in the solar atmosphere. In the case shown here we are looking at gas with a temperature of around 4-10 thousand degrees.

Bright regions on the main body of the Sun are called active regions while wispy structures which protrude from the edges of the solar disk indicates cool dense chromospheric material (80,000 degrees) suspended in the hotter, more diffuse corona (2 million degrees). These structures are knows as prominences. The pock-marked appearance of the Sun at this temperature is due to the distribution of magnetic field across the solar surface and its effect on heating the solar gas solar above it.