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Stereo View of the Sun

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on 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."

7 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Stereo Movie ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting


    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

  2. Great news! by leighklotz · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  3. somewhat current sun pic by fak3r · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

    --
    fak3r.com
  4. Re:Where in Orbit? by frankie · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re:Don't look at the Sun! by Dutchmaan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  6. Light by msbsod · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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!

  7. 3D image here. by Derling+Whirvish · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.