Sun Rings in Halloween with Haunting Jack-O-Lantern Grin

Here on Earth, people are gearing up for Halloween with pumpkin carvings, costume shopping and candy cravings, and it seems our Sun wants in on the fun, too. NASA has just released photos of the Sun and its active regions, looking eerily like a toothy grin on a jack-o-lantern's face.

On Wednesday, the same day that skywatchers enjoyed a full "blood moon," NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured the spooky image.

"Active regions on the sun combined to look something like a jack-o-lantern's face on Oct. 8," NASA said in a written statement. "The active regions appear brighter because those are areas that emit more light and energy - markers of an intense and complex set of magnetic fields hovering in the sun's atmosphere, the corona."

It's these bright areas that lent the Sun its festive expression.

And while the Sun can emit areas of bright luminescence, it can equally display massive dark patches snaking across its surface. Earlier this month, the SDO also identified an unusually long filament of solar material some one million miles across, from end to end. These filaments are clouds of dense solar material that are suspended on top of the Sun's surface by the workings of powerful magnetic forces. It's believed that these are the same mysterious forces that spark CMEs, or coronial mass ejections - eruptions that send solar material flying into space.

In this latest image of the Sun, two sets of wavelengths at 171 and 193 Angstroms are blended together. These were colorized in gold and yellow in order to create a particularly Halloween-like appearance.

Clearly, the Sun is just as stoked as we are for Halloween this year.

Though our eyes see the sun as yellow because it is the brightest wavelength from the sun, it actually emits light in all colors. NASA"s special instruments, such as ground-based or space-based telescopes, allow us to see the sun in different wavelengths not visible to the naked eye.

For more information on NASA's SDO, visit the website here.