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This Is Our Sun, Glowing Like an Evil Halloween Pumpkin

It’s Halloween weekend already, and thanks to globalization not only Americans are celebrating the moment, but people all over the world as well. In fact, if one looks close enough, one might find related images all over the Solar System.
The Sun in October 2014 6 photos
Photo: NASA/GSFC/SDO
Solar flare caught on different wavelengthsSolar flare caught on different wavelengthsSolar flare caught on different wavelengthsSolar flare caught on different wavelengthsSolar flare caught on different wavelengths
One of the icons of Halloween is of course the pumpkin. Otherwise a benign fruit, it gets turned into the stuff of nightmares each October, with more or less talented hands carving away the thick shell to create monstrous orange-yellow faces, some with teeth, others with evil grins.

Also known as jack-o'-lantern, these creations are said to have originated in Ireland centuries ago, and gained notoriety in the U.S. thanks to Washington Irving’s 1820 The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, where one of the characters, having lost their head, had a pumpkin for one.

Now, all of us humans suffer from something called pareidolia, It’s not a disease, or an affection, but the tendency of our brains to see familiar images and patterns where there are none. So, put Halloween, pumpkins, the orange-yellow Sun of our planet, and pareidolia in one basket, and what you get is this amazing, solar system-scale nod to this weekend’s celebration.

What you’re looking at is an actual image of our Sun. It was captured back in 2014, in October of all times, by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, a piece of hardware orbiting 35,789 km (22,238 miles) away from Earth and studying the Sun since 2010.

As per NASA, which once again brought the image back into focus as Halloween approaches, what we’re looking at are the active regions of the star at that time, giving it the appearance of a jack-o'-lantern.

To us, it looks more like pareidolia at play, trying to help our brains make sense of an object in space we’ll probably never fully understand.
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Editor's note: Gallery shows other images of the Sun captured using the Solar Dynamics Observatory.

About the author: Daniel Patrascu
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Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.
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