Solar Orbiter just delivered its most jaw-dropping image yet—an enormous, detailed snapshot of the Sun’s blazing outer atmosphere.
This isn’t just a pretty picture; it’s a 200-frame composite revealing swirling loops of solar activity, dramatic magnetic filaments, and the Sun’s complex, dynamic behavior. Captured using a precision 5×5 grid while cruising 77 million km away, this view is not only technically astonishing but visually stunning.
Unprecedented Solar Imagery From Orbiter
Five years into its mission, Solar Orbiter has once again delivered a remarkable view of the Sun. What you’re looking at is the Sun’s outer atmosphere, known as the corona, which reaches temperatures of over a million degrees Celsius. This image shows the corona as seen in ultraviolet light, revealing features invisible to the human eye.
Look closely and you’ll find arcs of hot plasma, charged particles, tracing the Sun’s tangled magnetic fields. Bright coronal loops glow above active regions, while cooler, darker filaments and prominences stretch across the surface in striking contrast.
Capturing the Sun, Grid by Grid
Creating an image of this detail and scale required careful planning. On March 9, 2025, from a distance of about 77 million kilometers, Solar Orbiter was programmed to scan the Sun using a 5 x 5 grid pattern. At each point in the grid, the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) captured six high-resolution images along with two wide-angle shots.
200 Snapshots, One Epic Mosaic
The image you see here combines a whopping 200 individual images into the widest high-resolution view of the Sun yet. (See previous full Sun views here.)
Zooming Into the Technical Specs
This large image was assembled from images taken between 13:06 and 17:31 UTC (14:06–18:31 CET) on March 9, 2025 by Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager at a wavelength of 17.4 nanometers. Solar Orbiter was viewing the Sun from a latitude 11.4° below the equator at a distance of around 77 million km. The final image is 12544 x 12544 pixels in size, corresponding 6171.6 x 6171.6 arc seconds or 2325.5 x 2325.5 million km. The Sun, which has a diameter of 1.4 million km, spans around 7505 pixels and 3692.6 arc seconds.
Solar Orbiter is a cutting-edge space mission launched through an international collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA. Its primary goal is to study the Sun up close, particularly its outer atmosphere, magnetic activity, and the origins of solar wind. Launched in February 2020, the spacecraft follows an elliptical orbit that brings it as close as 42 million kilometers to the Sun, inside the orbit of Mercury.
One of its key instruments is the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), which captures high-resolution images of the Sun’s corona in ultraviolet light. The EUI is led by the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB) and plays a crucial role in revealing the Sun’s dynamic magnetic structures, such as coronal loops and filaments. By combining detailed imaging with in-situ measurements, Solar Orbiter is helping scientists better understand solar activity and its effects on the solar system, including space weather that impacts Earth.
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