The Earth's shadow painted what looks like a silhouette of Jupiter on top of the sun in a new image from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.
SDO sits in a geosynchronous orbit directly above a research station near La Cruces, New Mexico, and transmits data on our local star non-stop to two large dishes on the ground. Usually, this position gives SDO a stellar view (so to speak). But near the spring and autumn equinoxes, Earth gets in the way. Once a day for about an hour, the spacecraft, Earth and the sun line up perfectly, and SDO is briefly blind.
The "Sunpiter" image is a composite of images through multiple color filters and a black-and-white magnetogram taken just as the sun was emerging from blackout. Magnetograms, visual representations of the sun's magnetic field, are compiled from a series of images spread out in time. The Jupiter-esque ribbons of color come from Earth's shadow moving across the sun.
"Errors can be beautiful sometimes," @NASA_SDO tweeted earlier today.
Eclipse season doesn't end until October 6, so we may have a full week of bizarre sun photos to look forward to.
UPDATE: Ralph Seguin wrote in to point out that the image is not the result of a spacecraft or processing error; it's more like a side effect of the spacecraft acting normally.
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