Were you fortunate enough to be able to see this April’s total solar eclipse, and to have a telescope on hand? And if so, did you get a look at the totally eclipsed Sun, with no filter? If so, you saw something beautiful, and something you were never meant to see.
I observed both the 2017 and 2024 eclipses telescopically. I used a filter during the time when the eclipse was partial, of course, in order to watch the Moon progress across the Sun’s face, covering over sunspots as it went. But when totality arrived, the filter came off.
Seen through the unfiltered telescope, the eclipsed Sun was absolutely gorgeous, both times. In the 2017 eclipse (below, left), the corona struck me as textured, and creamy-looking. There were streamers within it — each streamer being wider than the diameter of the Earth (more than 100 Earths could fit across the disk of the Sun, so anything of any size that we see in images of the Sun is bigger than Earth). As the Moon was about to reveal the Sun’s face again, I could see a forest of small prominences right on the edge of the Sun itself — and then the brilliant glow of the Sun appeared — and I looked away.
In the 2024 eclipse (above, right), the corona seemed to me smoother, whiter and less creamy. It was not as gorgeous as in 2017. But, the 2024 eclipse featured some big solar prominences, glowing gasses hanging well above the Sun itself, including a big gaseous loop that stood perhaps ten Earth diameters off the edge of the Sun. It was visible to the naked eye as a bright red spot hanging off the Moon.
I have seen prominences though a “Hydrogen-alpha” telescope constructed to filter the Sun’s light and reveal certain glowing gasses. The view is cool, yes, but does not compare to the unfiltered, “in real life” prominences. That big prominence was bright! Seen through the telescope, it was full of detail and almost glistened with varying reddish shades, in marked contrast to the monochromatic view through an H-α telescope. Absolutely beautiful!
By the way, there is a dynamic beauty in these solar features that the photos here do not capture at all. The photos are nice, but they are nothing like seeing the real corona and prominences.
Why should the corona and prominences be beautiful? In a certain sense, these are things we are not meant to see. Human eyes cannot look at the Sun. Human eyes cannot normally see the corona or prominences.
And the fraction of human beings across history who might just have happened to see a total solar eclipse by chance is tiny. At any given location on Earth, centuries pass (on average) between total solar eclipses. A few minutes of gorgeousness and then centuries of ordinary Sun. And human beings who did not possess the scientific knowledge to know that an eclipse was coming probably would not have been looking up and marveling at the corona and the prominences, but rather would have been terrified and cowering (and then unimaginably relieved when ordinary sunlight reappeared).
What else do we see that is like the corona and prominences? I propose that their beauty is unique in human experience, and suggests something about beauty itself.
When we look through our telescopes and see galaxies and nebulae and star clusters, we may find them beautiful, and we might think we are seeing something unique that we were not meant to see. However, humans have been seeing a galaxy with its nebulae and star clusters for all of human experience; the Milky Way galaxy and its Orion nebula and Pleiades star cluster and more are all visible with the naked eye. So is the Andromeda galaxy. If you haven’t seen these with your own two eyes that is because of our wasteful tendencies in night lighting — before artificial lighting everyone saw them; now that we send light (and money) spewing into the sky at night, only people who live where there are few lights see them.
We also see beautiful images from the Hubble or Webb telescopes, but those images are highly processed and do not represent what we would see if we were looking out the window of a spacecraft. They are modified to enhance scientifically important features and to conform to our own ideas of beauty.
Early microscopists marveled at the beauty of small creatures seen through the microscope. Robert Hooke wrote in his groundbreaking 1665 book Micrographia about how the beauty of the “tufted or Brush-horn’d Gnat” seen through a microscope reflected the hand of God, and how God’s power was such that God could pour care and beauty into even those things we cannot see (or could not until we built microscopes):
Take this [gnat] creature altogether, and for beauty and curious contrivances, it may be compared with the largest Animal upon the Earth. Nor doth the Alwise Creator seem to have shewn less care and providence in the fabrick of it, then in those which seem most considerable.
Nevertheless, we do see large mayflies and other bugs that look like the Brush-horn’d Gnat. The gnat’s appearance is familiar.
The solar atmosphere, by contrast, is not familiar at all. It is unique in being utterly alien, yet we can see it as it is, unfiltered and unprocessed. It is gasses heated to incredible temperatures, on a scale that dwarfs our entire planet. If you could teleport the biggest mountain, Mt. Everest, or even the entire Himalayan mountain range, into that big, beautiful April 8 prominence, you would likely not even see that vast mass of rock as a speck!
There are people who attempt to explain the beautiful through randomness and evolution: beauty merely emerges from random genetic mutations; we see beauty in flowers, but really flowers somehow are connected to some advantage for survival, and therefore our reaction to flowers is of the same nature as our reaction to eating cake icing. That is, cake icing (butter and sugar) is dense in calories; an appreciation for a dense source of food calories was a real advantage for survival when food was scarce; so obviously we like cake icing because we evolved to do so, because our distant ancestors had a random propensity to appreciate a dense source of calories, and thus were less likely to be malnourished and more likely to reproduce. And somehow evolution did something similar with flowers. And just like we call icing “tasty”, we call flowers “beautiful”. And ditto for galaxies, nebulae, gnats, etc.
Then what of the solar atmosphere? What of that which we were not meant to see, evolutionarily speaking, and never did see (except for a few minutes every few centuries), and which could confer no advantage for survival? Why is that so jaw-droppingly, achingly beautiful?
I think the corona and the prominences argue for there being more to beauty than mere butter and sugar. Beauty exists, the solar atmosphere tells us, independent of us. Hooke might have said that the solar atmosphere is beautiful because God can pour care and beauty into even those things we cannot see.
A shorter version of this post ran as a “Science in the Bluegrass” column in The Record, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Louisville.
