The face of our Sun has been captured by the most powerful solar telescope in the world.
The middle layer of the Sun's atmosphere, known as the chromoosphere, looks almost like a shag rug up close and personal to the giant star.
The bright hairs of fiery plasma can be seen in the image above, flowing into the corona from a sort of honeycomb- like pattern of pores, more easily visualized in the image below. Each of these blobs is approximately 1,600 kilometers wide.
The Sun's total diameter is only a single digit percentage of the 82,500 kilometer wide portraits.
Our own planet has been placed over the top for scale to put the enormity of these images into perspective.
The Inouye Solar Telescope is the most powerful instrument of its kind and is one year old.
During a solar eclipse, the Sun's chromoosphere can be seen, but it is usually invisible. New technology has made a difference.
This is the first time we've looked into the light source of our Solar System. The Inouye telescope can see features of the Sun as small as Manhattan.
Jeff Kunh, a solar physicist, said last year that it was the greatest leap in humanity's ability to study the Sun since Galileo.
Matt Mountain is an astronomer and president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy.
The insights gained from this new perspective will help scientists predict and prepare for solar storms which can send a wave of hot plasma and magnetism all the way from the Sun's corona to Earth.
We would like to thank the people of Hawai'i, the National Science Foundation, and the US Congress for their consistent support, as well as the Inouye Solar Telescope Team, who have devoted over a decade to this.
The Inouye Solar Telescope is located on the Haleakal volcano, which is important to Native Hawaiians. The telescope's construction was proudly claimed to have included native Hawaiian input, but some natives say the instrument still feels like an insult.
Native Hawaiians don't want the sacred site of Maunakea to be used for western scientific research.
It's clear that the Inouye Solar Telescope is a huge scientific achievement, but it comes at a cultural cost to the ancient community of stargazers.
Native people around the world used the Sun, the Moon and the stars to better understand our place in the universe.
As our focus narrows, we must not lose sight of the people who came before us.
We can get closer to the stars by standing on their shoulders.
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