What’s happening on the Sun..?

It’s summer, so of course the Sun is in the sky a lot. But without very special equipment – filters, telescopes, etc – it’s impossible to see much on it apart from the odd sunspot big enough to be seen on a binocular-projected image. Wouldn’t it be useful if there was a website you could go to for “live” views of the Sun at all the various wavelengths – visible, IR, UV, etc – just to see what our friendly neighbourhood star was getting up to?

Hey! There is! It’s here…

http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/sunearthday/media_viewer/flash.html

If you go to this brilliant little website you see this…

Each of those thumbnail Sun images shows the Sun at a different wavelength as seen by one of the many Sun-observing spaceprobes or telescopes currently in operation. If you click on one of the thumbnails the main window on the right displays a larger version of that image, and then you can zoom in on features within it, seeing sunspots for example in great detail. A nice touch is the addition of a pic of the Earth, at the bottom right, which remains in the correct scale with the main Sun image as you zoom into and out of it!

Go on, go have a play. 🙂