Looking directly at the Sun is not advised, but it's exactly what NASA's recently-launched unmanned IRIS spacecraft is designed to do. In fact, the spacecraft, which was launched into orbit 328 miles above the Earth in late June, has already returned its first batch of images of the Sun's mysterious lower atmosphere, and they don't disappoint. Using its single telescope and spectrograph (a light-separating instrument), IRIS has revealed a series of strange, previously unseen features on our parent star, what NASA describes as "a multitude of thin, fibril-like structures." The agency, along with the spacecraft's builders at Lockheed Martin, say they aren't sure yet what these are, exactly. "There is much work ahead to understand what...
via The Verge - All Posts http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/25/4557024/nasa-iris-sun-lower-atmosphere-first-images
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