A composite of 31 different images, taken in the shadow of the solar eclipse that passed over Asia and parts of the Pacific for 6 minutes and 39 seconds. That’s the longest solar eclipse anyone on Earth will witness this century; a longer one isn’t coming until 2132.

The photo shows the solar corona that make up the sun’s “atmosphere” in glorious detail. Its whorls and loops extend millions of miles into space, are nearly 200 times hotter than the visible surface of the sun, and yet aren’t nearly as bright (by a factor of something like a million), hence, we can only see them during eclipses.

In astronomy, an analemma ( /ˌænəˈlɛmə/; from Greek ἀνάλημμα “pedestal of a sundial”) is a curve representing the changing angular offset of a celestial body (usually the Sun) from its mean position on the celestial sphere as viewed from another celestial body (usually the Earth).

Because of the Earth’s annual revolution around the Sun in an orbit that is elliptical and tilted relative to the plane of the equator, an observer at a fixed point on the Earth sees the Sun appear to move in an analemma around a mean position, taking a year to do so. 

Summer 2012’s X1.4-Class Solar Flare