Solar scientists use both ground and space based telescopes to observe the Sun.   The two space based observatories that you can use to get near-real time data from are the SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) and ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer).   On this page we explain what a simple orbit is and then go on to show you the unusual orbits that the solar observatories are in.

The first person to work out how orbits worked was 23 year old Isaac Newton in 1666.   Up until then, people thought that things in orbit, like the Moon, were made of something completely different to ordinary matter on Earth - like the matter you, me and apples are made of.        They even had a name for this stuff; quintessence.   They reasoned that ordinary matter fell to earth - like apples, whilst things made of quintessence did not.

The young Newton came up with a startling new way of looking at things like the Moon.   He said that they were made of the same stuff that made up apples and, just like apples dropping from a tree, they were falling too.

Newton imagined a cannon firing cannon balls.  

The balls flew in a curve.   The more gunpowder that was put in the cannon, the faster the ball flew, the more shallow the curve and the further it went before it hit the ground.   Newton reasoned that if  you could get the ball moving fast enough the curve would be the same as the curve of the Earth and it would never hit the ground.   It would be in orbit.

Have a virtual go at this experiment with NASAs Jet Propulsion Lab by clicking this globe

It took nearly three hundred years after Newton's idea for mankind to put artificial satellites into orbit. when Russia launched Sputnik in October 1957.  

Most satellites are launched into circular or elliptical orbits around the Earth.   The orbits of  the SOHO and ACE observatory satellites are in much more unusual orbits.   1.5 million kilometres towards the Sun, far beyond the orbit of the Moon, there is a point where the gravity of the Earth and the Sun cancel each other out.  This is called the L1 Lagrangian point.   The observatories are in a 'halo' orbit around this point.   As the Earth orbits the Sun once a year, the observatories in their halo orbits get dragged around with us. From here they get a 24 hr a day look at the Sun.   All previous orbiting observatories were in Earth orbit and spent half of their time with their view of the Sun blocked by the planet.