Oregon Man Visits the Sun - Well, At Least Photographically. Video Results Are Spectacular

Published 06/21/26 at 6:55 a.m.
By Oregon Coast Beach Connection Staff

(Portland, Oregon) – It's hot as hell in Oregon on Sunday, June 14. Up around the mid 90s. So what does one Portland man do? He gets even closer to the sun. (All photos / video Patrick Finney)

Patrick Finney is an amateur astronomer and astrophotographer who manages to get some incredible stuff a lot from right here in the Rose City. That Sunday, he pointed his rig straight up into the sun – the very one that was beating down on Oregon and southern Washington with a vengeance. He managed to grab quite a few startling shots of our local star (called Sol, if you didn't know).

These were closeups, too: the kind you might expect from NOAA satellites. They show a fairly smooth surface (remarkably so, actually, considering what NOAA cameras usually capture). But then you see plenty of blemishes. There are big, long dark areas that look like cracks, blob-looking things of lighter shades, and then the flames. Sometimes, you even see the "granulations."

The sun is, after all, one helluva a hot place. These are more than just flames. There's a whole lot going on here on our life-giving orb.

And it turns out what you see depends on how you photograph it. Many aspects of the sun are not visible to the human eye – and not just because it's so bright. That's why satellites use various and distinct wavelengths like UV and such.

In this case, Finney used hydrogen-alpha gear and filter.

“The scope I used, was a Lunt LS60 H-Alpha Solar Scope with a 50ha sun filter attachment, to bring out more detail,” he said.

So, didn't he burn up outside in that raging heat?

“I actually shot that Sun sequence out my bathroom window, so I was still inside the house in the A/C fortunately,” Finney said.

Talk about literally having the best of both worlds.

He told Oregon Coast Beach Connection what we're looking at.

“The one pic where it looks like a fire cloud riding up is called a prominence, it is an ejection of particle streams of energy that escape from the surface due to the magnetic field being open in that area,” he said.

You're also seeing lighter spots around the sun as well as the big, long gashes.

“Those are coronal holes too,” he said. “The dark gashes are just more magnetism fluctuations, but the same thing basically. Just different degrees in the visual aspect, depending on the variable magnetic properties.”

Jim Todd, astronomer with Portland's OMSI added a little.

“This image shows the Sun captured in the hydrogen-alpha wavelength, highlighting the mid-chromosphere layer,” Todd said. “The bright orange and yellow surface reveals plasma fibril loops, filaments, and active regions of intense magnetic activity.”

Interestingly enough: no sunspots. Those did start appearing a few days later, however.

“There are no sunspots in my photos though, just emissions due to magnetic fluctuations,” Finney said.

In some closer shots, you also see what's called granulation.

NASA explains it this way:

“Similar to the patterns you can see at the top of a pot of boiling water, granulation is caused by heat rising to the photosphere from the hotter solar interior. Where the hot, rising blobs of plasma reach the surface, we see bright areas. The darker boundaries of the granulation cells are places where the plasma has cooled and is sinking back into the Sun's interior.”

Sometimes, these gouge-like dark areas are the remnants of filaments or filaments themselves. NASA says this: “When this magnetic field becomes unstable, the filament snaps and erupts, releasing vast amounts of energy into space (a coronal mass ejection).”

Interestingly enough - a whole week later - someone caught the aurora boralis on the Washington coast. It happened near Grayland last night (Saturday).

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