The Sun

A Photo-Essay Book

By Steele Hill and Michael Carlowicz

Published by H N Abrams Inc. ©2006

Introduction -- The Sun You Know and the Sun You Don't

Reviews and Highlights

About the Authors

A Glimpse

Favorite Links

Buy the Book

Storms from the Sun

After all these years, we think we know the Sun. It is familiar and ever-present, central to human culture. It’s so familiar that most of us hardly look at it, and so brilliant that we cannot. Yet billions of people still gather to worship it from Machu Picchu and Key West to eclipse and solstice festivals.

Neolithic people built Stonehenge to trace the Sun's seasons. Ancient Chinese astrologers blinded themselves trying to see its spots. Galileo pointed his telescope at it and was arrested by the Catholic Church for telling what he saw. Louis Fizeau and Léon Foucault took the first photograph of it. And in 1995, the European Space Agency and NASA built the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory to watch it 24 hours a day.

Now Harry N Abrams Books proudly brings you The Sun, the first photographic book dedicated entirely to our nearest star. This collection of more than 200 images exposes both familiar and unfamiliar phenomena, as well as human efforts to observe and analyze the Sun.

Authors Steele Hill and Michael Carlowicz offer one of the most eclectic and comprehensive collections of solar photos ever assembled…from sunrises and rainbows to sunspots and coronal mass ejections; from a solar eclipse to a sunrise on Mars; from auroras on Earth to auroras on Saturn. Along the way, the authors reveal little-known facts and recent discoveries about the middle-sized gas ball around which all life on Earth revolves.

Humans have long been intrigued by the cycles in the skies, from the daily rising of the Sun to the yearly procession of the seasons. The Sun rules the weather, feeds the plants, and warms the Earth. Wars have been started and stopped by the Sun; emperors and kings have been crowned and crushed in its light. The effects of our star on our modern society are equally monumental and mysterious. The Sun glimpses that  stormy star and considers the many ways that it affects how we live on Earth and how we might live in space.

Photo credits: ESA/NASA SOHO Project and Chris Linder