Nearly 400 years separate Galileo peering at the Sunrise through his new telescope and you using the club's solar telescopes and an observatory 1.5 million kilometres away.
Launched in December 1995, SOHO is a 1350kg satellite orbiting a point far beyond the orbit of the Moon, towards the Sun. Here the Earth's gravity is exactly cancelled by the gravity of the Sun. SOHO is a joint project between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
For those of you less scientifically inclined, the SOHO EIT instruments produce images which you can combine and manipulate to produce astoundingly beautiful pictures.
The observatory has 12 different observational instruments. Each has been designed and is operated by a scientific organisation in the USA or Europe. The following details are modified from the SOHO website.
The research tasks of the instruments can be divided into those studying the solar interior, atmosphere or wind.
Make your own SOHO model with this pdf file from the European Space Agency
esamultimedia.esa.int/images/spcs/ goodies/models/soho_model.pdf
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GOLF and VIRGO are able to sense low frequency vibrations on the whole surface of the Sun. In this way, information is obtained about the solar nucleus. It's a bit like using ultrasound to image the foetus in a pregnant woman. SOI/MDI measure vibrations on the surface of the Sun in fine detail. This gives information about the Sun's convection zone - the outer layer of the solar interior.
- GOLF (Global Oscillations at Low Frequencies)
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GOLF from the
Institut
d'Astrophysique Spatiale, France.
VIRGO (Variability of Solar Irradiance and Gravity Oscillations)
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VIRGO from
ESTEC.
MDI/SOI (Michelson Doppler Imager/Solar Oscillations Investigation)
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MDI/SOI from
Stanford University, USA.
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MDI image GOLF image
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SUMER, CDS, EIT, UVCS, and LASCO are a combination of telescopes, spectrometers and coronagraphs that observe the hot atmosphere of the Sun, the corona, extending far above the visible surface. SUMER, CDS and EIT observe the inner corona. UVCS and LASCO observe both inner and outer corona. They obtain measurements of the temperature, density, composition and velocity in the corona, and follow the evolution of the structures with high resolution.
- SUMER (Solar Ultraviolet Measurements of Emitted Radiation)
- SUMER from the Max-Planck-Institut für Aeronomie, Germany.
- SUMER from GSFC, USA.
- CDS (Coronal Diagnostic Spectrometer)
- CDS from Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, United Kingdom.
- EIT (Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope)
- EIT from the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, USA.
- UVCS (Ultraviolet Coronagraph Spectrometer)
- UVCS from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA.
- LASCO (Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph)
- LASCO from the Naval Research Laboratory, USA.
- LASCO from the Max-Planck-Institut für Aeronomie, Germany.
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LASCO C2 telescope image (left) UVCS image (right)
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CELIAS, COSTEP and ERNE analyse the composition of ions in the solar wind, and other energetic particles generated by the Sun. SWAN make maps of the hydrogen density in the heliosphere from ten solar diameters. It uses telescopes sensitive to a particular wavelength of hydrogen, allowing the large-scale structure of the solar wind streams to be measured
CELIAS (Charge, Element, and Isotope Analysis System)
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CELIAS from the
Universität Bern, in Switzerland.
COSTEP (Comprehensive Suprathermal and Energetic Particle Analyzer)
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COSTEP from the
University of Kiel,
Germany (in German).
ERNE (Energetic and Relativistic Nuclei and Electron experiment)
- ERNE from the University of Turku, in Finland.
- SWAN (Solar Wind Anisotropies)
- SWAN from FMI, Finland.
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SWAN from Service
d'Aeronomie, France (in French).
CELIAS data identifying elements in the Solar Wind
SOHO's orbit - click image for detail
LINKS
Click the link below to download a 1.7Mb pdf file of a paper model of the spacecraft directly from the SOHO site:
Click the SOHO logo to go to their home page
