No wonder ancient cultures once worshipped the sun as a god. But while the Greeks once portrayed our closest star as the charioteer Apollo, arcing across the sky, pulled by winged horses, today high-powered telescopes orbiting in the stratosphere capture the sublime sight of our sun in breathtaking detail.
NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in February 2010 on a 10-year mission “Living with a Star” to place an “unblinking eye” in the sky trained on our sun to record in real time light across a range of the electromagnetic spectrum, as well as solar events and phenomena of unimaginable grandeur.
