The Sun Our Very Own Star Assembled By Ken Mitchell Livermore TOPScience dtd; 3/15/09 Copy this URL into your browser

Earth’s Four Seasons

SOHO's Uninterrupted View of the Sun

Solar Prominence from SOHO See Notes

HR Diagram - Star Sequence

Cutaway of Our Only Thermonuclear Power Plant

Cutaway Diagram of the Sun See Notes

Sunspots From Hinode’s Optical Telescope See Notes

The biggest of the new-cycle spots emerged at the end of the month on Halloween (2008). Numbered 1007, or "double-oh seven" for short, the sunspot had two dark cores each wider than Earth connected by active magnetic filaments thousands of kilometers long. See Notes.

Twisted Solar Eruptive Prominence See Notes

Small prominences extend from the chromosphere up into the lower corona. See Notes

SOHO Best Sun Photo

Solar Prominence Extending Millions of Miles from the Sun's Surface See Notes

A Solar Prominence from SOHO

Sunspot Loops in Ultraviolet

Dark Sun Sizzling Heavy Ultraviolet Filtering Darkens Inactive Regions of the Sun See Notes

The Sun’s Corona See Notes

The Solar Spectrum See Notes

Solar System Raising Over Fire Island See explanation on next slide

Solar System Rising Over Fire Island Explanation: If you wait long enough, the entire Solar System will rise before you. To see such a sight, however, you will need to look in the direction of the ecliptic. All of the planets and their moons orbit the Sun in nearly the same plane, the ecliptic plane. From the Earth, this means that each day they will all rise in nearly the same direction - and later set in the opposite direction. Ten years ago, a series of time exposures caught, left to right, the Sun, Venus, the Moon, and Jupiter, all rising in the ecliptic plane behind Fire Island, New York, USA. Exposures were taken every six minutes and digitally superposed on an image taken from the same location at sunrise. Smaller members of our Solar System, including most comets and many asteroids, do not always move along the ecliptic plane. The picturesque Fire Island Lighthouse, visible in the foreground, was built in 1826 and is still in use today.

Ulysses Solar Orbit of the Sun -- (Solar Polar Flyby?)‏

The Sun’s Solar Activity Cycle Red dots denote 10 or more flares in a month. Yellow dots 3 to 9 flares. Green dots 1 or 2 flares. Frequency of X-flares during the last three solar cycles

Solar Cycle 23 is coming to an end

The longest minimum on record, the Maunder Minimum of , lasted an incredible 70 years. Sunspots were rarely observed and the solar cycle seemed to have broken down completely. The period of quiet coincided with the Little Ice Age, a series of extraordinarily bitter winters in Earth's northern hemisphere. Many researchers are convinced that low solar activity, acting in concert with increased volcanism and possible changes in ocean current patterns, played a role in that 17th century cooling. See Notes.

Analemma and the Temple of Zeus See Notes

Voyager 1 Passes into the Heliosheath See Note

Our Sun’s Life Cycle See Notes