NASA Solar Satellite's First Sun Images

coondoggie writes "NASA today showed off the amazing first pictures of the Sun taken from its 6,800lb Solar Dynamics Observatory flying at an orbit 22,300 miles above Earth. The first images show a variety of activity NASA says provide never-before-seen detail of material streaming outward and away from sunspots. Others show extreme close-ups of activity on the sun's surface. The spacecraft also has made the first high-resolution measurements of solar flares in a broad range of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths."

Comments

fuck the vat tax

[Anonymous Coward]

The US has gone from a nation of producers to a nation of consumers (mostly consuming chinese shit). It's time for our tax laws to recognize that by dropping income tax and going to a sales tax model. Here's the problem with the VAT -- it's added at every step of the transaction. A product manufactured in the US will get hit by the VAT throughout the entire production process whereas a foreign product will only get hit by the VAT once or twice (distributor and retailer). That puts American industry at an even worse disadvantage. Meanwhile, the US's only exports (culture and debt) will escape the VAT at export time.

Found another photo

[Yvan256]

Another photo of the Sun.

Re:6800 lbs?

[shadowbearer]

  I _knew_ someone was going to moderate that as flamebait when I posted it.

  Was it for castigating someone for wasteful criticism, or was it for the "idiot" moderator comment?

  If the latter, well, I had mod points, so I could simply have moderated the poster down...

  Oh, I know. It was for the 4chan comment!

  (Any moderator who mods this post troll or flamebait deserves the description "idiot". The proper moderation would be offtopic, which would also have been the proper response not only to my other post, but to the parent to my other post. )

SB