Stereo View of the Sun

Roland Piquepaille writes "NASA's STEREO mission will be launched in 2006 with the goal of imaging the sun and the solar winds in 3-D. According to NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center and to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), two identical spacecrafts will be placed in different orbits to provide us with 'stereo' views of the Sun. After the launch in Spring 2006, the two observatories will be separated after a couple of months, one orbiting ahead of the Earth, and the other staying behind. So we should be able to see the Sun in 3-D in less than a year."

Comments

Do Not Stare Into Sun With Remaining Good Eye

[Tackhead]

Nothing for you to see anymore. Please stumble along.

Re:Do Not Stare Into Sun With Remaining Good Eye

[Shadow Wrought]

"I thought we weren't supposed to look directly at the sun?"
"Its cool. We have 3-d glasses."

Re:Do Not Stare Into Sun With Remaining Good Eye

[plover]

"If you keep looking at the sun, you'll go blind!"

"Well, can I just do it until I need glasses?"

Re: Do Not Stare Into Sun With Remaining Good Eye

[GillBates0]

And good luck trying to view the "stereo view" with the one remaining eye.

Re:Do Not Stare Into Sun With Remaining Good Eye

[Shadow Wrought]

"The Sun in 3D sure is cool. I just wish we could see more of it."
"No problem! Try these X-ray Specs."

Re:Do Not Stare Into Sun With Remaining Good Eye

[Haydn Fenton]

"The Sun in 3D sure is cool. I just wish we could see more of it."

sun.google.com, anyone? I mean why not, they're already after all the info on Earth, as well as mapping the globe.. and the moon.

Re:Do Not Stare Into Sun With Remaining Good Eye

[EpsCylonB]

cant we see the sun in 3d everyday ?

Re:Do Not Stare Into Sun With Remaining Good Eye

[JohnFluxx]

3 days ago I accidently looked into a blue (440nm) 5mJ pulse laser beam. Burnt out a tiny bit of my retina. Now I really do have only one good eye :( I was really lucky and the damage is pretty tiny.

Such is life :)

Re:Do Not Stare Into Sun With Remaining Good Eye

[petermgreen]

the quality of stereo vision depends on the ratio of the distances between the two views and the distance to the object.

human eyes are good enough at it for everyday uses but not for judging depth in anything more than a few meters away. For longer distance ranging we rely on our knowlage of the size of objects.

Re:Do Not Stare Into Sun With Remaining Good Eye

[JohnFluxx]

I didn't know that was so dangerous. I used to do it all the time. Partly because the moon is cool, partly because I loved putting in green filters and taking picture of a 'green cheese moon', but mostly because the moon was the only object I could see with the stupid non-automatic-focussing telescope. *grin*.

FWIW, my eye is getting better, but I think I'll permanently have a blind spot in the very centre of my vision. Means i can't read with that eye, but that's all. My worry at the moment is that I'll over stretch the other eye because when reading it has to do the work of both.

Re:Do Not Stare Into Sun With Remaining Good Eye

[ckaminski]

If, as expected, these spacecraft are going to orbit at the Lagrange points, then with an "eye-to-eye" distance of approximately 2*10^6 miles, and a distance of 93*10^6 miles to the sun, we get a ratio approximately 46:1.

Comparing my eyes at 3" in separation, to my ability to determine depth to at least 45", and you have a ratio greatly exceeding 150:1

I'd suggest that these spacecraft will do remarkably well in 3D compared to the human eye. Resolution, on the other hand, is a completely different argument.

Re:Do Not Stare Into Sun With Remaining Good Eye

[ckaminski]

s/45"/45'/g

Can't we do that already?

[johndierks]

Can't I see the sun in 3-D right now, by looking out the window?

Re:Can't we do that already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Caution: Don't look at the laser^HHHHH sun with your remaining eye!

Re:Can't we do that already?

[bizard]

Not to spoil a good joke, but no. Your eyes aren't far enough apart to get stereo vision past about 18 feet. You can move your head around to improve that (and your brain does a good job of faking it), but not good enough for stereo vision at 1au.

Another interesting part of the mission is that over a period of several years, the stereo craft will actually get further away from earth giving us an ever changing view. I just saw a talk at the Berkeley SSL by one of the scientists about the new solar weather modeling they will be able to do with it.

Re:Can't we do that already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering I'm a student at JHU right now, with particular expertise in 3D visualization, maybe I should be contacting JHU-APL for a summer job :S

Re:Can't we do that already?

[ArAgost]

So will I get a nice stereo image of the sun... as seen from 18 feet apart?

Re:Can't we do that already?

[Anonymous Coward]

The solar weather report? "Continued hot today, about 1,000,000 degrees in the corona. Watch out for plasma storms if you're flying to Mercury." Sounds just like yesterday's report.

Re:Can't we do that already?

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't matter. Everyone here in Kansas knows the sun is a disk that emerges from the eastern horizon and is consumed as it comes into contact with the western edge of Earth in the evening. Don't go shooting things into the sky at it, lest it not come back!

Re:Can't we do that already?

[Darius Jedburgh]

Clearly your head isn't big enough. Stereo views of distant objects are just more things that are better when your head is the size of a planet.

Re:Can't we do that already?

[bizard]

better when your head is the size of a planet.

yeah, but then people give you menial tasks like escorting humans around and opening doors...it all gets very depressing

Re:Can't we do that already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is "3D" a synonym for depth perception?
I can walk out on my deck and see 3 or 4 miles up the gulch I live in, and I see 3D out to about that far. That is, I can tell which trees are in front of which trees. But whether that's "stereo" or not... hmmm. Is stereo like the old ViewMaster dohickey?

Re:Can't we do that already?

[tolkienfan]

That's not entirly accurate. With stereoscopic vision, you can determine, for example, that those stars are much further away than a little light, nearby. So stereoscopic vision works at those distances, it just doesn't allow you to distinguish the distances of a couple of stars, for example.

Re:Can't we do that already?

[Anonymous Coward]

not to nitpick (or spoil the joke attempted here) but he had a BRAIN the size of a planet.... i realize that to some there's no difference, but if his head were really that big people would be standing on him and he wouldn't be any good for menial tasks

Re:Can't we do that already?

[Dirtside]

Head the size of a planet, and they ask me to stare at the sun. Unbelievable...

Re:Can't we do that already?

[Bloke down the pub]

If his brain were that big, you'd assume his head would be at least as big, if not bigger. Assuming an orthodox, pseudovertebrate anatomy of course.

Re:Can't we do that already?

[gnunzo]

Your body rarely stays still enough for you *NOT* to see in stereo vision. Your 18 ft was debunked by modern perception theory. Even just the slight variation of rocking back and forth creates stereo vision much further than 18 ft.

Plus visual memory allows you to, like NASA does with all of their space photos, see composite images, to merger images you have seen from one angle with another angle giving you not a "faked" version of stereoptics, but a "composite" version.

Or at least that is most recently what is being taught in Perception classes in grad schools.

Stereo Movie ?

[Anonymous Coward]

will it be a stero movie ? taking a 3D image of a large ball of hot gas that changes shape by the minute is surely impossible

Re:Stereo Movie ?

[jamesgomez]

will it be a stero movie ?

RTFA

I doubt it, STEREO is simply an acronym for ... The two Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO)

Re:Stereo Movie ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares? I'm still waiting for the sun in 8.1 surround sound!

Re:Stereo Movie ?

[MidnightBrewer]

If both probes take an image at the exact same moment, wouldn't the result be a stereo still image? Doesn't seem all that hard.

Looks like...

[AndreiK]

Hey, who turned down the detail level? All I see is a yellow sphere!

Re:Looks like...

[Mayhem178]

They didn't turn down the detail...someone turned up the contrast! I've been staring for 3 hours now and all I see is a big white dot!

Whoa, if I look away all I see is a big black dot. Damn you, you who messes with the contrast in my head!

Re:Looks like...

[Octopus]

Please use the Adobe Gamma Wizard applet in your neural net interface.

Has this Knowledge Base article helped you?

* No * Yes * I hate you.

Haha....

[jamesgomez]

Time to bust out the STEREO GLASSES!

http://resumbrae.com/s04/images/glasses-anaglyph.j pg

Muahaha, so rad.

The Old Technology Was Better...

[__aaclcg7560]

So a box with a pin hole is no longer cutting edge technology?

Re:The Old Technology Was Better...

[coldmist]

No, since you can't cut a pinhole with a 'cutting edge', it never was or ever can be considered such. Sorry to burst your bubble.

Stereo

[steveo777]

Wait, stereo is only two channels. Wouldn't Dolby make more sense?

Re:Stereo

[lightningrod220]

Yeah! Get Dolby involved, and they'll make it Surround Sun(TM).

Warning: The theater could become quite warm rather quickly. If so, run... fast.

Re:Stereo

[applef00]

Not to get pedantic, but that's exactly what I'm going to get. Stereo means multichannel, not just 2.

Re:Stereo

[adrianmonk]

Wait, stereo is only two channels. Wouldn't Dolby make more sense?

Perhaps THX would be even better. In fact, I think you could say that THX is all about seeing the Sun.

Re:Stereo

[c_forq]

Not until they improve their HD offerings. This is high tech, we need to go with DTS HD.

Re:Stereo

[Ignominious Cow Herd]

That would take "Blinded me with Science" to a whole new level.

What? Oh. Not THAT Dolby?

Re:Stereo

[drinkypoo]

Actually, it doesn't mean either. If you just look in the dictionary you will find that while stereophonic means two or more channels of sound, stereo is from the Greek stereos, or "solid" and stereoscopic means relating to a stereoscope, which specifically uses two images.

Re:Stereo

[JustADude]

I think it'd be better in Dubly.

Re:Stereo

[adrianmonk]

Geez, was I too subtle? This being Slashdot, I thought at least somebody here would've seen movies by a certain director...

How about 180 Degrees?

[Lev13than]

This 'stereo' view seems a bit silly, since we already know what it looks like from our perspective. I'd like to see a satellite positioned 180 degrees from earth along our orbit, so that we can finally get a look at the dark side of the sun.

Re:How about 180 Degrees?

[Dr. Zowie]

I know you're kidding -- but farside imaging exists now. Look here - it is a continuously updated false-color map of the Sun. Of course, the far side data are not a true photograph, but a reconstruction made from measurements of sound waves that propagate all the way through the star.

Re:How about 180 Degrees?

[Anonymous Coward]

You moron. There would be nothing to see: there's no light on the darkside of the sun.

Re:How about 180 Degrees?

[gardyloo]

You moron. There would be nothing to see: there's no light on the darkside of the sun.

      Duh. It could carry solar-powered flashlights!

Re:How about 180 Degrees?

[Anonymous Coward]

Every once in a while the sun rotates and you can see the dark side from earth. It's called an eclipse. Interestingly the sun isn't completely black on the dark side. Scientists say it's because the moon reflects some of the light from the bright side to the dark side. You can also see a "ring of fire" where the sun's bright side lightens its atmosphere.

Re:How about 180 Degrees?

[bobbagum]

how about... The dog is burning

Re:How about 180 Degrees?

[Anonymous Coward]

>the far side data are not a true photograph,
>but a reconstruction made from measurements of sound waves

Yeah, because sound waves, being vibrations, travel so well through the emptyness of OUTER SPACE!

Re:How about 180 Degrees?

[Anonymous Coward]

he said through the STAR which is certainly not empty. here's to you, mr. reading comprehension guy.

I'm blind!

[geekster]

On both eyes!

Where in Orbit?

[kf6auf]

So how far apart are these going to be placed? I mean, are they going to be at the Lagrange points, which seem to be spread awfully far apart but might work, or somewhere else where the position is unstable and requires thrusters?

Also, what kind of instruments do these have? If we want, can we point them at other things and get useful pictures? Either way, it should be interesting.

Re:Where in Orbit?

[xv4n]

"We don't have time for twenty questions"

Re:Where in Orbit?

[amightywind]

Check out the mission website. Cool stuff.

Re:Where in Orbit?

[frankie]

Yes, they'll use lunar slingshots to reach the Lagranges.

Rather than launching arbitrary pairs like this, I wonder if we could place large permanent scaffoldings at the L1 and L2 points with docking points to put dozens (hundreds?) of different probes out there without worrying about collisions.

Re:Where in Orbit?

[necro81]

It is true that the langrange points are spaced pretty far apart, both in terms of angular and distance separation. On the other hand, the ability to discern things in 3D is a function of the baseline distance. For humans, it's 10-20 cm, and we can judge distance out to a couple dozen meters at best. I believe, based on what I've heard here and in the articles, that they'll be stationed at L4 and L5, which are +/- 60 degrees along earth's orbit, or at 120 degree angular separation when they are looking at the sun. If one were to compare that with a human's eyes, that would be roughly equivalent to staring a little in front of your nose. The human brain can construct a lot of depth perception at that range, even if it gives you a headache pretty quick.

Along with the headache thing - I don't think that the purpose of this mission is to create nifty stereoscopic pictures of the sun for you and I to look at, like with red/blue glasses. Instead, they'll plug the data into some computers and run some vision algorithms on them to come up with a 3D-spatial map of what's out there, which we could then pan/tilt/zoom and fly through to get a better sense of what's going on. With a baseline distance of something like 100 million kilometers, you would be able to construct a very clear 3D map of everything between the Earth and the Sun, down to whatever the resolution of the cameras are.

With a camera at L3, which is opposite the sun from the Earth, we would have three satellites spaced 120 degrees apart, almost the same distance from the sun, and able to give us a complete 360 degrees of 3D image. Then we just have to wait for holographic projectors to catch up!

Re:Where in Orbit?

[Bad D.N.A.]

"So how far apart are these going to be placed? "

They are both given a deltaV, one + and the other -. They move apart at something like 20 deg/year, one leading the Earth and the other trailing the Earth.

  "Also, what kind of instruments do these have?"

The spacecraft have a pretty broad suite of instruments, in situ energetic particles, fields and waves plus coronagraphs for taking pictures of coronal mass ejections.

One of the problems we have with our pictures of CMEs right now is that they are all taken from Earths orbit, we have never had a side shot of a CME that is going to hit the earth. It will be excellent to have a time sequenced image of the CME, then have that same structure impact the Earth with a full suite of instruments measuring the density, temperature, velocity, etc....

It burns! IT BURNS!

[digitaldc]

Stereo Suns are NOT cool.

Don't look at the Sun!

[fak3r]

It's an old one, but bears repeating:

Every time there is a solar eclipse you will find astronomers warning you to never look directly at the Sun. Even more importantly, you should not look at the Sun through a telescope unless you have a professional solar filter that covers the front of the telescope. Why?

The Sun is very bright and by focussing the light onto the back of your eye (the retina) with or without a telescope, you are putting a lot of energy (both optical light and infra-red) onto a tiny area. At some point in your life you may have tried to set paper on fire using a magnifying glass, so just think about that being done to the back of your eye. It isn't nice. Even more scarily is the fact that the retina of your eye does not have pain receptors, so you will not even feel the damage being done. It may not even become apparent until later.

I built the shoebox with the pinhole deal when I was a kid, and remember being scared to death on the day the eclipse occured!

Re:Don't look at the Sun!

[Dr. Zowie]

Ah, jeez, that old thing. Looking at an eclipse is quite a different affair than looking just at the Sun. Looking directly at the Sun with your naked eye is dazzling and maybe a little stupid, but it won't make you go blind: the human eye's minimum pupil size is coincidentally just small enough to handle the energy flux (which makes sense in the context of evolution). Eclipses trigger a bug in the eye's auto-aperture system, so that your pupil can end up wide open as you look at the mostly-eclipsed Sun. That can 'burn' pinholes in your retina.

Re:Don't look at the Sun!

[Dutchmaan]

Speaking of the pinhole viewing of eclipses.. Back in the early 90's there was a near total eclipse where I was going to school. My car was a convertible and it was a bright warm day in May..

Well, stopping at the drive up ATM which happened to be located under a young tree... I looked down and my car seat was covered with hundreds of tiny eclipses coming into and out of focus as the sunglight came through tiny "pinholes" made by the spaces between overlapping leaves which were slowly moving with the small breeze. It was quite a sight to behold right there in my car.

Re:Don't look at the Sun!

[thegarbageman]

Looking directly at the Sun with your naked eye is dazzling and maybe a little stupid, but it won't make you go blind... Not in the sense that it causes complete lack of vision, but it can cause a permanent loss of vision in the center of your field of view.

Re:Don't look at the Sun!

[Anonymous Coward]

"...the retina of your eye does not have pain receptors, so you will not even feel the damage being done. It may not even become apparent until later."

That is not exactly true, any sensory neuron has the capability of encoding painful stimuli if the intensity of stimulation is increased enough. While not true nociceptors, the sensory neurons in the retina can sense pain if the light is bright enough. This is why if you use night vision goggles and the light source becomes very intense you will feel pain (which gets exploited in action movies all the time). Next time you are at the optometrist, notice whether you feel a slight pain from the bright light being shone/shined through your pupil when the doc is checking your retina.

Re:Don't look at the Sun!

[justthisdude]

But Momma, that's where the fun is!

Re:Don't look at the Sun!

[aug24]

When we had an eclipse here in 1999, the SAP team at my then contract stuck a sheet of paper up to the window and put a literal pin-hole in it. They were then trying to find the tiny, tiny projection of the sun on the floor. When I pointed out that all the holes in the ends of the blinds were casting little crescent shaped lit patches on the floor, they were amazed. Typical SAPpers, doing it wrong, I thought.

Justin.

Re:Don't look at the Sun!

[Skyhawkelite]

Eclipses trigger a bug in the eye's auto-aperture system So how do I put it to manual?

Re:Don't look at the Sun!

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of practice in front of a mirror. It can be learned. Freaks people out.

Great news!

[leighklotz]

This sounds like great news to me. Solar cycle 24 should be just about beginning shortly after this thing gets operational. Try this RSS feed of solar weather from hfradio.org.

somewhat current sun pic

[fak3r]

This image of 1,500,000C gas in the Sun's thin, outer atmosphere (corona) was taken March 13, 1996 by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft. Every feature in the image traces magnetic field structures. Because of the high quality instrument, more of the suttle and detail magnetic features can be seen than ever before. (Courtesy ESA/NASA)

http://www.solarviews.com/raw/sun/eitfexii.jpg

Freaky looking, but damn cool!

Re:somewhat current sun pic

[RapidEye]

Here is a link to ALL of the different Sun Pictures in all sorts of wavelengths and formats:
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/

Yes, those are Live and RealTime Shots

Enjoy!

PS - and yes, that is a NEW set of sunspots getting ready to cross the sun!

Re:somewhat current sun pic

[Kaetemi]

Just a question, but why exactly is it green?

Re:somewhat current sun pic

[Anonymous Coward]

And i thought it was the MOON that was made out of green cheese!

Re:somewhat current sun pic

[fak3r]

Thanks, these are fantastic, and this animated one is awe inspiring! http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/LATEST/current _eit_304small.gif

Re:somewhat current sun pic

[RoloDMonkey]

It looks even better here.

Re:somewhat current sun pic

[RapidEye]

Agreed - those animated shots are mindblowing!!!

Try it doing a couple of different wavelengths!

You'll soon have a whole new admiration for 50X Sunblock =-)

sun in stereo?

[vision864]

no thx certification?

At last!

[Garg]

We'll be able to see that mirror-image planet over there!

Re:At last!

[ashitaka]

Oooooh, Someone else remembers that movie! The effects by Gerry Anderson's team rocked, but the story now looking at it with much older eyes was pretty stupid.

It's 3-D!

[SuperKendall]

You would need a box with TWO pinholes to equal this advance in technology!

The trick is making one pinhole red and the other blue...

Re:It's 3-D!

[__aaclcg7560]

I must be getting old... :P

Re:It's 3-D!

[mikael]

Now there's an idea ... I've seen camera obscura's which project an image onto a large table, but in monovision only. Would it be possible to have a camera obscura with two camera lenses, each of which polarizes the light onto the table. Then the scene could be viewed with a pair of 3D cinema glasses.

Re:It's 3-D!

[networkBoy]

you would need to bend the light via prisms, thus technically no longer being a camera obscura (though in all honesty I would say it was still obscure enough to qualify).
-nB

Re:It's 3-D!

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that comment is reserved for Slashdot IDs less than 100k.

We can't do that already.

[Webmoth]

No, we can't see it in 3D when we look out the window. The reason is that our interocular distance - the spacing between our eyes, about 60-70 mm - is too narrow in relation to the distance involved. I don't recall the practical limit of this ratio, but beyond a certain range all objects appear to lie in the same plane. When you look at the moon, shading is your only clue that it is not a flat disk. (Does a single-image photograph of the moon have any less appearance of depth than when you look at the moon directly?) This is also why we can't tell just by looking how far away each star is. We can only tell by observing the stars at opposite ends of Earth's orbit -- effectively making the interocular distance millions of miles.

Current sun pics

[Dr. Zowie]

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/latestimages.h tml

Stereo?

[dastardly_villain]

I prefer my Sun in 5.1

Nerds.

[nathan s]

I guess there's some truth to the sallow or pasty scientist. Some people need to get out more!

(Yes, I know, eyes too close together, bla bla...) Still.;-)

Stupid frickn' NASA Wasting Money

[OzPeter]

(grumble, whinge, complain)

Fat lot of good its going to me .. I am blind in one eye, so I *can't* see in 3-D .. No matter how good the fricking cameras are .. I'll still see in 2-D. Waste of money .. blah .. blah .. blah ...

(/grumble, whinge, complain)

(And for the humour impaired .. yes that was not to be taken seriously .. even though I *am* blind in one eye)

(And for the spelling impaired .. American English is *not* my native tongue)

Re:Stupid frickn' NASA Wasting Money

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=wiggle+3d

Re:Stupid frickn' NASA Wasting Money

[OzPeter]

*bastard* .. I *still* can't see 3d .. but that link was really interesting. Thanks

Re:Stupid frickn' NASA Wasting Money

[banda]

Hogwash! You can see in 3D. You can perceive depth and dimension with your one good eye. You just can't preceive stereopsis - the part of visual perception that ViewMasters and other stero imaging relies upon.

Steropsis is just one of about a dozen ways the human brain preceives depth. In fact, it's one of the least reliable and least useful, since it only works for objects at middle range with contrasting depths in the same scene, and only when things are relatively still.

Much more useful are the other cues, things like parallax, relative size, relative motion, color intensity (things far away are hazier), etc. You use those methods of depth perception far more often than stereopsis. Stereopsis can't help you catch a baseball. Stereopsis can't help you determine how far away a mountain range is. You aren't missing much.

Except ViewMasters... man those things are cool.

Make your own 3D images of Mars and things

[saskboy]

http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/spotlight/3d01.html

NASA provides a guide for those with Photoshop, to make red / blue stereo images like you see on their website.

If anyone wants to convert the steps in the link to The Gimp 2.2, I'd be very greatful. I get stuck on about step 5 when I paste the 2 colour image into the other grey one and don't get the shaddowy red blue image that needs adjusting.

Re:Make your own 3D images of Mars and things

[Jugalator]

And they keep claiming there isn't life on Mars...

Pfft...
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/spotlight/images/3d01h. jpg

Re:Make your own 3D images of Mars and things

[Anonymous Coward]

In GIMP, you can use the Decompose and Compose filters. I don't have access to GIMP right now, but IIRC what Decompose does is separate the red, green and blue channels of one colour image into three grayscale images, and Compose does the opposite. So you can decompose both images, then compose the red channel of one with the green and blue channels of the other. (If the background seems to be in front of the people, you ought to have composed the red channel of the other with the green and blue channels of the one.)

Unlike NASA's watered-down-for-amateur-Photoshoppers method, you never have to convert to grayscale. So this should give you a full-colour stereo image where everything has the right colour when seen through red-blue glasses.

Backup?

[flyinwhitey]

I skimmed the articles, but I didn't see it.

What are the plans if one of these fails? Isn't the point having two of them?

SOHO daily views are best for now

[Lu]

Some of the best images of the sun's daily activity are to be found at SOHO's site, http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/. I check it daily.

If you choose "the sun now" and then the MPEG or animated gif of the LASCO C3 (full res is best - and I'm so sorry SOHO for doing this to you!!!) you can watch as a comet makes a close approach to the sun today. Happens every few days. Sometimes they make it out the back, but most get eaten up. We'll see with this one.

more detail for parent

[Mark of THE CITY]

Iris size reacts to how bright something is in the visible spectrum, but don't react to the amount of UV, which does the damage. That's why good sunglasses have UV filtration.

Launch at night

[sapped]

I hope they realise that they need to launch these craft at night otherwise the sun is going to burn them to a crisp.

Talk to me when...

[NVP_Radical_Dreamer]

Talk to me when they have a 5.1 view of the sun

Glory Be!

[Octopus]

Just when I was losing faith in NASA...

THE HUBBLE VIEWMASTER

http://www.worldwideslides.com/View-Master/sp.html

But Momma, that's where the fun is!

[mencik]

Momma told me not to look into the eyes of the sun, but Momma, that's where the fun is....

lagrange points

[prurientknave]

And so the battle for the control of the lagrange points begin!

I see no other reason for this sudden interest in a stereoscopic view of a big bright ball of plasma

Re:lagrange points

[Anonymous Coward]

And that is a good demonstration of your fuctional ignorance.

Re:SOHO - sorry, here's faster links

[Lu]

for GIF: http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/LATEST/current _c3.gif

or JPEG: http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/LATEST/current _c3.mpg

Sorry about that.

Serious Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Any idea of the apparent size of the sun based upon the separation of the two imaging spacecraft being analogous to the distance between human eyes? Is this going to look basketball sized? Baseball? And held at what length?

PASA

[Anonymous Coward]

A similar mission conducted by the Polish Space Administration was an utter failure. Apparently, the launch was delayed for several hours, and by the time the spacecraft arrived at their assigned orbits it was already night.

google sun pro!

[digitallysick]

haha

This article is useless

[Hugonz]

I can just look out the window straight into it, and then I'll be able to seeNOOOOOO MY EYES!!!!!!!!!

an on topic and off topic reply

[gcnaddict]

Well I doubt that the satellites would be able to 3D-ize an eclipse anyway, but


"trigger a bug in the eye's auto-aperture system"

Seems like the work of our friends at Microsoft, dont you think? :P

Overkill?

[RomulusNR]

Why do we need to launch satellites to get stereo views of the sun?

Can't we just take a picture, wait for Earth to revolve a couple degrees around the Sun, and then take another picture?

Re:Overkill?

[ByrneArena]

Not when you are trying to capture a solar flare as it is occurring in 3D (which is the point of the project). If you use two cameras you get the images of the event at the same instance where as you approach would at best give you an extrapolated image and not a true image.

Re:Overkill?

[Dynedain]

A couple of degrees = a couple of days.

Perhaps they'd like to capture events that occur in a matter of hours rather than days...

Re:Overkill?

[necro81]

I think that the plan is to place the satellites at the two lagrangian points that lie along Earth's orbit, which are +/- 60 degrees with respect to Earth. With 120 degrees of angular separation between them, they'll be able to resolve stuff with great depth perception, in close to real time (minus the transmission delays, computer time, etc.). In order for the earth to travel that same 120 degree arc along its orbit would take roughly four months, a much longer time scale than most interesting (or dangerous) solar phenomena.

Re:Overkill?

[Anonymous Coward]

The explosion in a CME only really lasts a few days. So you would be taking a picture, waiting a few days... and taking a completely different picture. The result? You get 2 2d images instead of 1 3d image. Or more technically 1 3d image where the third dimension is time, not spatial. That wouldn't work.

Re:Overkill?

[Derling Whirvish]

A couple of degrees = a couple of days.

Jeez, it rotates 360 degrees in 24 days. You don't have to wait for the earth to revolve around the sun a few degrees (slow), all you need to do is wait for the sun to rotate a few degrees (faster). Just take any two consecutive frames from one of those SOHO movies and there you are.

Re:Overkill?

[Dynedain]

What if it isn't the sun you are trying to capture, but the solar flares or solar wind that is coming off of it.

And again, if an event happens in a matter of hours (not days) then during the time between the two "frames" the event could have changed enough that you can't construct a 3D view of it because the frames don't match.

Re:Overkill?

[Dynedain]

Oh, and the grandparent said wait for the Earth to rotate around the Sun... that takes around 365.25 days to go 360 degrees last I checked...

Re:hi

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it sucks more than the sites it links to?

Would you have to use prisims?

[SuperKendall]

Actually, it seemed like if you had the placement of the openings correct, with filters in front of them - that you would then achieve the proper spacing between the images that 3-D glasses might be able to render the scene properly for you.

A fun project to try anyway! I was joking at first myself but am curious enough to try it out with a simple pinhole camera.

Another possible option - if the optics of the situation require a prism, perhaps you could instead correct the scene with more complex glasses?

Re:Would you have to use prisims?

[networkBoy]

If I didn't have a list of projects a mile long I would try this as well.
One thing I've done before was to take two B&W slides, one with a red filter, the other with green. Two projectors and filtered glasses produces a remarkable result. Either:
A) Super-impose the two images and get a color projection
B) Filter the projections and offset them, viewers wear R/G glasses and see 3-D
-nB

Re:Would you have to use prisims?

[mikael]

A standard tourist class camera obscura simply requires three things: a lens (large polished convex crystal glass), a parabolic screen near the floor, and a mirror. The light is focussed by the lens, reflected by the mirror downwards and projected onto the screen. Depending upon the sophistication it is possible to add a few gears/control rod to rotate/tilt the lens/mirror around and optionally move the lens away/towards the mirror.

To view a stereo scene, you would need two lenses separated horizontally by a convenient distance. Each lens would have a mirror to project the light horizontally towards the central mirror. Inbetween would be the polarizing mirror. Then the reflecting downwards mirror and screen would be the same as normal.

Nice to see Roland again! (and again... and again)

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I wonder if anything he submits is ever refused?

Addicted to Solar Weather

[corezion]

Thanks for sharing this news. I usually try to keep up with spaceweather.com and SOHO images but I've been swamped lately. I think it would be fascinating to view CMEs in 3D! :)

peace,
core

Promise of Eventual Stereo View of the Sun

[ankhank]

Dammit, quit trying to write headlines that will succeed in tricking me into clicking this guy's links when there's nothing there yet.

A future promise of a picture is not a picture.

Can't...Resist...Karma Burn

[emarkp]

Ze goggles! Zey do nuzing!

Nonsense

[SuperKendall]

I am blind in one eye, so I *can't* see in 3-D ..

Just move your head back and forth about 30 times a second. :-)

Re:Nonsense

[OzPeter]

And then I get dizzy after about 2 seconds, and have to shut my eyes and hold my head, and wait for the pain to go away. The end result is that in all practiality .. I *still* can't see 3-d (not for long any way)

Stereo View?

[catdevnull]

All I see are these damn bright spots all over the place....

Is that the smell of my retina burning or is somebody cooking a squirrel?

Example images...

[Animaether]

http://www.phys.uu.nl/~bassa/eclipses/20051003.htm l

You young hooligans

[Dwonis]

Back in my day, "Dolby" meant "low pass filtering"!

Re:hi

[Anonymous Coward]

oh okay. thanks a lot for helping me. but I still think it is weird because I like slash dot it is funny and I do not think it sucks.

What is going on?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope these two spacecrafts work ... if I read the article right and all goes well we could end up hearing Sheryl Crow's "Soak up the Sun" in stereo from space. I dig that tune!

ID

[Belial6]

But since our eyes were made by an "Intelligent Designer", doesn't that mean that we have been designed to go blind? Looking directly at the sun is the Intelligent thing to do!

Re:ID

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Maybe it means the "Intelligent Designer" is imcompetent, or just mean spirited. For more evidence, see the following design flaws: The Human Back, The Prostate Gland, The Appendix, and The Human Eye (blind spot).

Gee. Or maybe the scientific theory of evolution makes sense after all.

Re:ID

[Anonymous Coward]

not that i'm neccesarily disagreeing with your underlying thought, but why would evolution (in all its infinite wisdom of diversity and statistics and natural selection) give us The Human Back, The Prostate Gland, The Appendix, and The Human Eye (blind spot)? But if someone says this was the natural way ordered by an "intelligent designer" or whatever, then it disproves it, showing the impossibility since those things should never exist? even though they exist now because they were the BEST choice. i don't get the double standard when you could just say 'id is crap' and leave it at that.

Re:ID

[foobarbaz]

Because none of those things bite you until after breeding age, which is the only thing evolution selects for, while an intelligent designer would presumably want you to be comfortable throughout your life.

Re:ID

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Exactly. There is a common misconception that evolution is about selecting the optimal design, and that things tend to get progressively better. Unfortunately, only those traits which confer both a reproductive advantage and are able to spread throughout the gene pool will be passed down. In light of this, evolution is the only explanation for the "good enough" qualities which makes sense.

Light

[msbsod]

It takes about 1 million years for the photons to travel from the sun's center to the outer shell due to multiple scattering (sun radius=695Mm), before they eventually reach earth after another 8.3 minutes. Why not appreciate the light in 3D!

Insensitive...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have stereoscopic vision and can't see your 3D horseshit, you insensitive clod!

Spoiler

[kiwioddBall]

Its largely spherical with flares shooting out. Can I have some money?

Wow! A 3D view of a hot orangy thing in space!

[grolschie]

...or maybe it's more whitey, but it don't sound as biqut2.

Should I be concerned?

[scottgfx]

Should I be concerned that the satellites have the name "ViewMaster" on the side of them?

3D image here.

[Derling Whirvish]

I did what I said and extracted two consecutive frames from the SOHO images and 3d-ified them with red/cyan images (so you can use your 3D glasses from Spy Kids 3D or Shark Boy/Lava Girl or some other 3D DVD you have at home). The left eye is red, right eye cyan. Consecutive images were too flat, so this is from frame 170 and frame 172 of the animated gif. I dropped it down from false-color to black and white to make it easier to see.

What do you think?

http://img487.imageshack.us/my.php?image=3dsun9li. jpg

Some of the features have evolved. But the sphere shape is there as are some of the more macro features such as the corona and flares. The granules don't match up though.

That's from about five minutes of work.

Re:3D image here.

[Dynedain]

And I'm sure if thats all they wanted, they wouldn't have planned for a set of satellites.

Re:3D image here.

[Derling Whirvish]

I forgot to add that the left/right images are 12 hours apart.

Re:3D image here.

[Derling Whirvish]

But this was to illustrate how much simpler it would be to wait for the sun to rotate and take two images from that, rather than waiting for the earth to revolve around the sun. Remember the original post? "Can't we just take a picture, wait for Earth to revolve a couple degrees around the Sun, and then take another picture?" It was never to illustrate a substitution for the dual observatory program. Focus, people!

Re:3D image here.

[Dynedain]

Focus, people!

On slashdot? You must be new here...

When...

[DarthSensate]

do we start stringing the nanotubes between these Earth-trailing orbit satelites and begin the Ring World construction?

http://www.larryniven.org/reviews/58.htm