Pic of the Week: Solar Flare X1 from AR2994 in ‘Motion’

This week’s image is one of the finalist photos in the 2023 Astronomy Photographer of the Year shortlist held by the Royal Museums Greenwich. Check out the site for other fascinating finalist images.

Here is a little more about this solar flare image from photographer Miguel Claro taken in the Dark Sky Alqueva region, Évora district, Portugal:

“I was testing my new camera from Player One Apollo-M Max and photographing another region of the Sun, when I was notified by the SpaceWeatherLive app that an eruption was ongoing at 13.47 (UTC, Universal Time) with the release of an extraordinary X1-class solar flare [X class flares are the largest],” Miguel says.

“I had to immediately change my initial plans and pointed the telescope as quickly as possible to the limb where the flare departed from sunspot AR2994, already hidden behind the edge of the Sun. According to SpaceWeatherLive, ‘the explosion produced enough radiation for a strong shortwave radio blackout over the mid-Atlantic ocean and Europe’. Conditions were unstable, but I managed to make a short timelapse of about 27 minutes.”