Image description: This photograph of the corona of the sun was taken during a solar eclipse in 1900 by Smithsonian photographer Thomas Smillie. A team from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory loaded several railroad cars with scientific equipment and headed to Wadesboro, North Carolina. Scientists had determined that this small town would be the best location in North America for viewing an expected total solar eclipse, and the expedition hoped to capture photographic proof of the sun’s corona. Smillie rigged cameras to seven telescopes and successfully made eight glass-plate negatives. At the time, Smillie’s work was considered an amazing photographic and scientific achievement.
Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archives
The Old Man In the Sun
This video shows a series of images taken of the sun. When displayed from lowest temperature to highest temperature, you can begin to see features similar to a face in the surface of the sun.
Video by NASA.
Learn what ancient cultures knew about the sun’s movements in this article from NASA.
Video description: This video shows our Sun over several weeks during a period of highly unusual solar activity. It is comprised of images taken by a device called the Solar X-Ray Imager (SXI), which is aboard one of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s (NOAA) weather satellites. NOAA monitors the Sun with the SXI in order to predict when solar flares may cause dangerous problems on Earth, such as communications failures and power outages.