Pictures of the Sun
Sep. 3rd, 2003 09:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinThe single best-kept secret at NASA, for some reason, is this Web page, which just lists in one place all Web sites for past, present, and future American space science missions (and others with some NASA involvement), many of them quite obscure. There is buried treasure in there.
My favorite sites for repeated visiting, and possibly the most underrated sources of cool-looking pictures in the space program, are SOHO and TRACE, a pair of telescopes in space that observe the Sun in wavelengths inaccessible from the ground.
SOHO is a European-American observatory that has been hovering around the L1 point between Earth and Sun since 1996, sending back pictures of the whole solar disc and the corona. There are pictures and movies sent back almost in real time. It's fun to watch the coronagraph record of a big mass ejection, especially when it comes right at us: a big blob of fire expands out of the Sun and then, zap, the picture fills with noise when it hits SOHO.
TRACE is a satellite that takes more magnified pictures of psychedelic and often as-yet-unexplained... stuff... happening in the lower corona. The project Web site is a bit chaotic, but some time spent digging around in there is worthwhile. It's a great source of fiery desktop pictures for your computer.
The pictures were even better a few years back at solar maximum (they've got archives), but there's always stuff going on.
My favorite sites for repeated visiting, and possibly the most underrated sources of cool-looking pictures in the space program, are SOHO and TRACE, a pair of telescopes in space that observe the Sun in wavelengths inaccessible from the ground.
SOHO is a European-American observatory that has been hovering around the L1 point between Earth and Sun since 1996, sending back pictures of the whole solar disc and the corona. There are pictures and movies sent back almost in real time. It's fun to watch the coronagraph record of a big mass ejection, especially when it comes right at us: a big blob of fire expands out of the Sun and then, zap, the picture fills with noise when it hits SOHO.
TRACE is a satellite that takes more magnified pictures of psychedelic and often as-yet-unexplained... stuff... happening in the lower corona. The project Web site is a bit chaotic, but some time spent digging around in there is worthwhile. It's a great source of fiery desktop pictures for your computer.
The pictures were even better a few years back at solar maximum (they've got archives), but there's always stuff going on.