NASA offers the sun — in STEREO

NASA's twin STEREO probes were positioned on each side of the sun on Sunday and are now beaming back uninterrupted images of the entire star — front and back.

"For the first time ever, we can watch solar activity in its full 3-dimensional glory," says Angelos Vourlidas, a member of the STEREO science team at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC.

NASA released a 'first light' 3D movie on, naturally, Super Bowl Sunday.

Vourlidas called it a "big moment in solar physics."

"STEREO has revealed the sun as it really is--a sphere of hot plasma and intricately woven magnetic fields," he said.

"There are many fundamental puzzles underlying solar activity. By monitoring the whole sun, we can find missing pieces."

Each STEREO -- Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory -- probe photographs half of the star and beams the images to Earth, where researchers combine the two views to create a sphere.

But these are no ordinary pictures.

STEREO's telescopes are tuned to four wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet radiation selected to trace key aspects of solar activity such as flares, tsunamis and magnetic filaments. Nothing escapes their attention.

"With data like these, we can fly around the sun to see what's happening over the horizon — without ever leaving our desks," says STEREO program scientist Lika Guhathakurta at NASA headquarters.

Source: www.torontosun.com...

Just thought I'd share this with everyone, as it seems like a pretty important find, except I'm not too deep into solar sciences. I wonder if an ATS member could enlighten me as to how significant this is, other than my enjoyment in seeing a real image of the entire surface of the sun at once. Artistically, this is a great accomplisment, and of course, knowing when solar flares may arise where we could usually not see them is a plus.

I made a thread about this last year in November. My Thread It didn't seem of much interest to many.
But I myself found it to be quite interesting as they would have been able to view the front and back of the Sun all at once. This has never happened before.

Its just a shame that the Sun was not spewing out flares from the far side, like it had a week or so ago.

The media seems to be re-releasing everything lately. Stereo has been up since 2006.

Stereo