My Little Adventure with Solar Corona Colors
So, I got this idea stuck in my head the other day about the “three primary colors of the solar corona”. Sounds fancy, right? I’d seen these amazing pictures of solar eclipses, and the corona always looked kinda ghostly white, maybe a bit pearly. But someone mentioned specific colors, like primary ones, and I thought, “Okay, I gotta see this for myself.” Not like I have a space telescope in my backyard, you know, but I figured I could mess around with some images.
First thing I did was grab some public domain images of the solar corona. You can find heaps online if you look around. Downloaded a few high-res ones that looked promising. Fired up some basic photo editing software I have – nothing professional, just the usual stuff. My plan was simple: crank up the saturation, maybe play with the color balance, see if I could pull out these supposed “primary” colors.
Here’s what I tried:
- Pushing Saturation: My first move. I slid that saturation bar way up. Things got colorful, sure, but mostly in a weird, artificial way. Not exactly distinct primary colors popping out. Mostly just made the whites look weirdly tinted.
- Adjusting Levels/Curves: Tried to isolate different brightness levels. The corona is faint, so I thought maybe the colors were hiding in specific brightness ranges. This was tricky. Got some slightly different hues, maybe a hint of greenish or reddish tint in certain areas, especially further out from the Sun, but nothing screaming “primary color”.
- Color Balance Tinkering: Messed with the cyan-red, magenta-green, yellow-blue sliders. This just felt like randomly painting over the image. Didn’t feel like I was uncovering anything real.
Honestly, it was a bit frustrating. I spent a good couple of hours squinting at the screen. It wasn’t working like I thought it would. The corona stayed stubbornly faint and mostly whitish in the parts I could clearly see. The colors I did manage to bring out felt forced, like artifacts of the processing rather than true colors.
It kinda reminded me of this time last year. I was stuck at home for a while, feeling pretty low, everything seemed gray and monotonous. I remember trying to find something, anything, interesting or colorful in my everyday routine. Looking out the window, trying to really see the different shades of green in the neighbor’s hedge or the way the light hit the pavement. It took effort, you know? Just like with these corona images. The beauty, the color, it wasn’t just handed to me. It was faint, subtle, and maybe I didn’t have the right tools or the right eyes back then, or even now with these space pictures.
So, did I find the “three primary colors”? Nah, not really. Not in the way I expected, like finding bold red, green, and blue. I read later that the colors people sometimes talk about are often specific wavelengths of light emitted by super hot gas, like a specific green from iron atoms. That’s way beyond my simple photo editing. It’s not like mixing paint.
My main takeaway? The corona is beautiful, but its colors are subtle, maybe even hidden to basic observation or simple tools. It’s not a rainbow. It’s more ethereal than that. And sometimes, the process of looking for something specific teaches you more about the looking itself, and maybe about patience, than about the thing you were looking for. Was a good reminder, actually. Still cool to look at those pictures, though.
