OUR SUN
| Sunspot1 | A large sunspot! |
| Sunspot2 | Beautiful detail in a sunspot in May, 2000, and other images from the Swedish Solar Observatory on the Canary Island of La Palma. |
| Sunspot3 | A complicated sunspot group observed on September 24, 2000. |
| Granules1 | Solar Granules. |
| Granules2 | Larger image of solar granules. Their typical size is 1,000 km. |
| Spicules1 | A high resolution picture of solar spicules. |
| Sun4 | This image from the TRACE satellite (Transition Region and Coronal Explorer) at a wavelength of 171A (~1 million degrees) shows a rapidly cooling, postflare loop system on the Sun. A spectacular movie captures six hours of the evolving cooling loops, showing the heavy showers of coronal rain as cooled material falls back to the surface. |
| Sun5 | This movie shows activation of a tiny filament which leads to a series of loop brightenings and a small, irregular two-ribbon flare, observed in the TRACE 171A wavelength band, on October 14, 2000, 19:30-24:00 UT. |
| Sun6 | This spectacular TRACE image shows bright solar gas at one million Kelvin and darker gas at 10,000 Kelvin. |
| Sun7 | Coronal loops on November 6, 1999. TRACE image. |
| Sun8 | Two eruptive prominences in March, 2003. This extreme ultraviolet image was taken by the SOHO satellite. |
| MercuryTransit! | A collage of images taken with TRACE. The images are taken in the 171-Angstrom channel (Fe IX/X; characteristic of material at approximately 1 million degrees), the 1600-Angstrom passband (UV line and continuum emission; mostly showing material at around 5500 degrees on the disk, and material at about 100,000 degrees just above the solar limb), and a broad-band white-light channel (around5500 degrees). Note that whereas the planet Mercury just comes within the edge of the Sun in white light, it comes much further onto what appears as the disk in the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) image at the top: the offset between the white-light and EUV limbs is approximately 4,000 (plus or minus 200) km. This is caused by the envelope of chromospheric material immediately above the surface: white light goes right through is, but EUV light does not. The EUV doesn't shine through until much higher. This demonstrates clearly that the Sun is just a gaseous sphere without a well defined surface: at different wavelengths the Sun has a different size. |
| Mercury Transit #2 | Spectacular image of the Mercury transit on May 7, 2003. One exposure was taken every 15 minutes. |
| Solar Spectrum | Absorption lines in the solar spectrum. From the McMath-Pierce Solar Observatory. |
| Jet Against the Sun | Spectacular photo of a jet seen in front of the solar disk! |
| Annular Eclipse! | An annular eclipse seen centered on a palm tree in January of 1992. |
| Coronal Mass Ejection | Movie of coronal mass ejections from a huge sunspot group in October, 2003. |