Sunday, July 25, 2004

Here comes the sun

The SOHO (Solar & Heliospheric Observatory) project is cranking out some amazing data these days. The spacecraft, which was a joint project of the ESA and NASA, is the first of it's kind to not orbit the Earth... it is 1.5 million kilometers closer to the sun in a halo orbit around the L1 Lagrangian point.

the sun, 24 July 04


The SOHO site has some pretty impressive photo galleries; the Best Of SOHO is a good place to start, and if you've got the bandwidth for it check out the incredible movie [4.6MB MPEG] of this week's solar activity. The Latest Images page always has links to pictures and movies taken in the last 48 hours, as well as access to all other data the craft has collected since early 1996.

The craft was designed to operate 'for at least two years'... kudos to the engineers and scientists whose talent and vision are still bringing us such cool data about our sun almost 9 years after the launch date.