APOD 3.8 Detailed View of a Solar Eclipse Corona

During a solar eclipse, the solar corona, the sun's outer atmosphere, is visible. This faint, thin outer layer is not bright enough to be seen on a normal day, only during a solar eclipse. Its not that the corona is not bright, its just that the photosphere, the part of the sun that we see (the surface), is so much brighter than the corona that it overwhelms it and the corona is not visible. The intricate structure of the corona is easy to see with the naked eye, but when it is photographed, the structure is incredibly hard to capture. During the 2008 solar eclipse in Mongolia, this image was taken. This picture is a composite of many images and digital processing. You can easily see layers and the glowing caustics of an ever changing mixture of hot gas and magnetic fields. You can see the shape of the magnetic fields above small pink solar prominences.