The sun looks like a creepy jack-o'-lantern in this NASA photo
Photos taken by a NASA space observatory in 2014 capture the sun in all its incredible, scary glory.
The images show our home star shining with a menacing, jack-o'-lantern-like smile.
The image, taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) just before Halloween two years ago, actually shows active regions on the star fortuitously lining up to look like a smirking face.
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"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," NASA said of the orange and black photo in a statement.
The spooky image wasn't the only one captured by the SDO that day.
The observatory also caught the pumpkin sun shining in ultraviolet, extreme ultraviolet and other wavelengths of light used to inspect different aspects of the sun's atmosphere in finer detail.
The SDO is part of a fleet of sun-staring spacecraft that help scientists gather data about the star.
By tracking the star's activity, scientists can more accurately predict dangerous space weather -- like bursts of hot plasma and solar particles -- that might head toward Earth, posing a risk to satellites in orbit or the planet's power grid.
Today, the sun doesn't look quite like a pumpkin through the SDO's mechanical eyes.
NASA updates that spacecraft's webpage with new photos every day showing how our sun looks at any given moment, and it's constantly changing.
The star's atmosphere is dynamic, with magnetic fields breaking and reforming miles above the star, giving the SDO an ever-changing image of the star's look.
The SDO, which has been in space since 2010, is known for taking high-resolution images of our star, at times capturing amazing photos of huge arcs of plasma shooting from the sun's atmosphere.
The observatory is also able to see color variations in the star depending on what wavelength of light it's viewing the sun in.
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
