You'd Think Every Year Would Be A Heliophysics Year

April 19, 2024 11:39 AM

Heliophysics Big Year [24m] is a video from NASA Edge about, well, apparently a big year for heliophysics, or the study of the Sun. The Solar Observatory at Sunspot NM is a pretty interesting place to visit. If you're ever in the vicinity of White Sands National Park, you're only a couple of hours' drive from Sunspot, in a completely different environment from the desert floor below.

At the bottom of the last link in the post is a panorama shot of the Tularosa Basin that shows White Sands as seen from Sunspot. It's pretty cool

posted by hippybear (12 comments total)

Well crap I was just there last week

White Sands was pretty meh-y but I dig Ibservatories
posted by torokunai at 11:57 AM on April 19

That looks like a long windy grade-filled brake-smouldering drive, but I feel like jumping in my car right now to do it.

Also someone needs to come up with the lyrics for "H.B.Y."
posted by credulous at 12:00 PM on April 19

I have not felt the same way about the sun since seeing the SOHO images and animations made from them. Something about them, and then watching video of solar storms, really brought home that that's a star up there, and stars are terrifying! (But interesting!) (But scary!)
posted by mittens at 12:19 PM on April 19 [1 favorite]

Weird thing about the sun is that I was taught it was so far away, but really if the earth were an inch in diameter the sun would only be 3 football fields away… not that distant (the sun is 9’ at this scale, the width of a parking space)
posted by torokunai at 12:36 PM on April 19

The solar filter I bought for my telescope which went unused during the cloudy eclipse is going to get a lot of use looking at the sun this year!
posted by grumpybear69 at 3:22 PM on April 19

Agreed.

The sun is terrifying. Going to wipe us out someday. Glad I will be long dead when that shit happens...
posted by Windopaene at 3:25 PM on April 19

The sun is terrifying

It is an eternally exploding hydrogen fusion explosion happening so much and so often in such a dense patch of matter that a photon generated from a reaction might take 100 years or more to reach the surface to escape to be captured by your eyeball as sunshine.

The levels of terrifying that the Sun is... are much deeper than your comprehension can calculate.
posted by hippybear at 4:08 PM on April 19 [1 favorite]

We still have yet to fire anything into the sun, and frankly, I'm disappointed in us.
posted by emjaybee at 6:13 PM on April 19 [1 favorite]

What would be gained by firing anything into the sun?

Other than watching something we selected being consumed by increasingly stronger barrages of various subatomic particles until it was finally torn apart?
posted by hippybear at 6:30 PM on April 19

What would be gained by firing anything into the sun?

We should ask Cillian Murphy.
posted by mittens at 6:31 PM on April 19

The Parker Solar Probe counts, depending on your interpretation of “into”. Close enough for me anyway!
posted by credulous at 6:48 PM on April 19 [3 favorites]

The sun is really active these days. There's always sunspots and prominences visible if you have a solar telescope. My neighbor has one (a small Lunt) and brings it out onto his driveway every clear day around noon. I manage to get a view once a week or so.

Our local astronomy club has a Solar Sunday every clear Sunday afternoon in the big park in the center of town. Runs for a couple of hours. Usually there will be about 3 solar telescope plus a couple of different kinds of sundials.
posted by neuron at 9:58 PM on April 19 [1 favorite]