The Sun You Know and the Sun You Don

An Introduction to The Sun --

The Sun you know and the Sun you don't

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

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All of us know what the Sun looks like…or do we? 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. All of us know what the Sun looks like…or do we?

We have spied it in the sunrise and sunset—the only time most of us can view our star without going blind. But have you ever considered the view from space? What do the astronauts and satellites see? The Sun rises once every twenty-four hours if your feet are on the ground; it comes up 16 times a day (every 90 minutes) if you live on a space station. It never sets on the satellite known as the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).

We have watched the sunbeams settle through the trees, but how many of us think of the Sun when we see auroras? Long after nightfall, the reach of the Sun can stir up Earth’s atmosphere until it swirls with ghostly rays of light.

Clouds may cover up the sun, swallowing it up in a midday thunderhead. But it’s still there, just as it is still present when the swirling clouds of solar wind-blown aurora puff up to eat the moon.

From the ground, we can see pillars of light stretching out of the sunset; above the atmosphere, we can see massive balloons of electrified gas erupting out into space. Rainbows tease out the color of sunlight, while telescopes can tune into one or all of the colors of its electromagnetic spectrum.

Wars have been waged and halted because of events on the sun; emperors and kings have been crowned and crushed in its light. As far back as you go into history, the Sun has been the center around which life revolves. Food, rhythm, energy, light. And these practical gifts have sometimes morphed into supernatural ones, as people have observed the cycles in the sky and seen hints and hopes of universal order and divinity.

There is a Sun we know—the one we draw in our kindergarten artwork and captured in our sunset photos from Key West. And there is a Sun most of us do not know—unless we’ve been spending a lot of time out of the sunlight in the library, the observatory, or on the Internet.

This book depicts the Sun in ways familiar and not so familiar. The story of our Sun is told not just by the daylight, but by the night sky; not just by its full brilliance but also its reflected, distorted, and bent light; not just from Earth, but from the edge of the solar system.

Photo credits: Shaun Lowe, Dick Hutchinson, Lauri Kangas, and NASA