Solar Images Gallery

For visual accent, our web site features spectacular ultraviolet spectrum images of the Sun, as downloaded through Solscape, a unique freeware application.

Solscape is a "solar data browser" application that grabs real time, up to the minute images of the Sun in multiple light wavelengths. Solscape also monitors current solar flare, geomagnetic, and Aurora activity, providing current Aurora Borealis information and warnings for your location, along with real-time Aurora images when available.

Solscape mines the wealth of data provided by NASA, NOAA and other research organizations from around the Internet and brings them to you in one convenient, easy to use application. You can save and archive the data that Solscape collects for later use, and you can tell Solscape to automatically grab the data when you want. Solscape is provided free of charge and runs on MacOS or OSX computers only.

SOHO Spacecraft Circles Sun

The SOHO (Solar & Heliospheric Observatory) project is being carried out by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as a cooperative effort between the two agencies in the framework of the Solar Terrestrial Science Program (STSP) comprising SOHO and CLUSTER, and the International Solar-Terrestrial Physics Program (ISTP), with Geotail (ISAS-Japan), Wind, and Polar.

SOHO was launched on December 2, 1995. The SOHO spacecraft was built in Europe by an industry team led by Matra, and instruments were provided by European and American scientists. There are nine European Principal Investigators (PI's) and three American ones. Large engineering teams and more than 200 co-investigators from many institutions supported the PI's in the development of the instruments and in the preparation of their operations and data analysis. NASA was responsible for the launch and is now responsible for mission operations. Large radio dishes around the world which form NASA's Deep Space Network are used to track the spacecraft beyond the Earth's orbit. Mission control is based at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

For more information about SOHO, we invite you to visit: sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov. You can download the Solscape desktop application at www.stimpsoft.com.

SOHO EIT Images

The Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) captures the solar atmosphere at several wavelengths, and therefore, shows solar material at different temperatures. In the images taken at 304 Angstroms the bright material is at 60,000 to 80,000 degrees Kelvin. In those taken at 171 Angstroms, at 1 million degrees. 195 Angstrom images correspond to about 1.5 million Kelvin. The hotter the temperature, the higher you look in the solar atmosphere.

SOHO MDI Continuum Images

The MDI (Michelson Doppler Imager) images shown at left were taken in the continuum near the NiI 6768 Angstroms line. The most prominent solar features are the sunspots on the solar photosphere. This is very much how the Sun looks like in the visible range of the spectrum, for example, looking at it using special 'eclipse' glasses: but remember, never look directly at the Sun!

The Sun: Fact Sheet

STUDY RESOURCE: Refer to this series of tutorials on the mathematics and physics of the sun, written for general readers by David P. Stern, a retired NASA extraterrestrial physicist.

More Astronomical Images

If you are interested in seeing other fascinating space images, we suggest you check out NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day, which is updated daily together with authoritative explanations from professional astronomers. Direct from the International Space Station is the Space Station Science Picture of the Day, a fascinating daily series of images taken within the space station and outside into space. Also of note is NASA's planetary images portal site, which catalogs satellite photographs of all the solar system's planets. We invite you to view this special composite daytime image of Earth and a night-time composite, two notable entries from the Astronomy Picture of the Day serial site. A huge archive of astronomy-related FTP download sites is maintained by the University of Arizona chapter of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.

Other notable astronomical sites include SpaceWeather.com, which publishes up-to-the-minute science news and information about the Sun-Earth environment, and NASA's spacecraft tracking site with a fascinating Java-powered viewer for 3-D space position references on hundreds of earth-orbiting satellites. Also useful is the JPL tracking site for Potentially Hazardous Asteroids. For a complete historical, photographic and scientific record of the six Apollo lunar landing missions, 1969-1972, be sure to see the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. The latest photographic research from the Hubble space telescope offers fascinating insights into the beauty of galactic and intergalactic space.