APOD 3.1

This picture "Millennium Solar Eclipse", is a very peculiar one when one first looks at it. It appears to be a giant golden ring in the sky, and a very eye-catching one at that. Upon further reading though I discovered that this is actually a picture of an annular solar eclipse. This might seem rather ordinary, but this specific eclipse lasted for 11 minutes and 8 seconds in its peak area, and will be the longest one for another 1,000 years. As I perused the relevant links within this article, I learned something as to why the edges of the 'ring' appear grainy and rough. This is because the image was taken through a filter that only transmits light from hydrogen atoms, which subsequently transmitted the convection in the Sun's atmosphere.