Stereo View of the Sun

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday November 14, 2005 @08:47AM from the fly-on-the-wall dept.

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."

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Re:Don't look at the Sun! by Dr.+Zowie · 2005-11-14 09:09 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.