Blazing Hybrid | Space Wallpaper

This vivid space wallpaper is a color composite image made from a ground-based eclipse image obtained by the Williams College Eclipse Expedition in Gabon and a wide-field EUV mosaic of the solar corona obtained (more or less) simultaneously in space by SWAP onboard PROBA2. The image shows the ground-based WL observation in blue and the EUV SWAP image in gold. SWAP observes emission lines from Fe IX/X at about 174 Å, corresponding to plasma at about 0.8 MK, while the eclipse image is insensitive to temperature. As a result, the eclipse contribution to the combined image allows us to see the global coronal structure, while the EUV reveals only those parts of the corona at about a million degrees. This image was released Nov. 3, 2013.