First Photograph Of The Sun
It’s hard to believe that after photographs became more common, people were so quickly able to apply the new technology to capturing advanced images. The first photo of the sun, shown above, was made by French physicists Hippolyte Fizeau and Léon Foucault. They, like many others of this time, used a daguerreotype. More than 160 years ago, their seemingly simple black and white photo was remarkable for depicting our sun not as an overwhelming, ungraspable celestial body, but as another star in the sky. Our star in the sky.
And something even more surprising – you can even see the sunspots. Sunspots are caused by disturbances in the Sun’s magnetic field welling up to the photosphere, the Sun’s visible “surface”. The powerful magnetic fields in the vicinity of sunspots produce active regions on the Sun, which in turn frequently spawn disturbances such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). However, even though this is the first time it was captured in photograph doesn’t mean people hadn’t known about them. The sunspots were discovered in the early 1600s.
