Weather of Arabia - A group of astrophotographers captured a breathtaking view of the last "hybrid eclipse" that was visible in the sky over Australia last week.
The image mainly shows the ghostly filaments of the sun's corona, or outer atmosphere, but it also captured a faint glimpse of eruptions of magnetized plasma, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), blasting away from the sun.
The rare eclipse, which occurred on April 20, is known as a hybrid because it consists of two separate eclipses that occur at the same time. These included a total solar eclipse - a transient, complete occultation of the Sun - and an annular solar eclipse: a longer but incomplete eclipse in which a halo of plasma remains visible around the Moon.
The new image is a composite of hundreds of images taken by Czech astrophotographers Petr Horak, Josef Kojal and Milan Hlua, from Pebble Beach in New South Wales, according to Spaceweather.com.
The combined image showed the peak of the total solar eclipse, which lasted about a minute and was the only time the sun's corona was fully visible. However, the details captured in the new image are "much more than what the human eye can see," according to Horek.
Astrophotographers were hoping to get a glimpse of the corona that day, but they also didn't expect to see a coronal mass ejection explosion far from the sun.
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