And Now, Starring the Sun

Quick, what’s the most photogenic object in our solar system? Earth? Yeah, pretty. Saturn? Lovely rings. But for sheer drama and majesty, it’s hard to beat pictures of the sun taken from spacecraft like SOHO and STEREO.Those satellites are about to be eclipsed (sorry) by the Solar Dynamics Observat…

Quick, what's the most photogenic object in our solar system? Earth? Yeah, pretty. Saturn? Lovely rings. But for sheer drama and majesty, it's hard to beat pictures of the sun taken from spacecraft like SOHO and STEREO.

Those satellites are about to be eclipsed (sorry) by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, which launched this morning from Cape Canaveral, Florida on an Atlas V rocket. The SDO will observe the local star across multiple wavelengths, at higher resolution and with a faster frame rate than any of its predecessors. In other words, we're about to see the best high-definition movies ever made of the sun.

Oh, and there's science, too.

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