Tag: SOHO

With a quiet Sun, no active sunspot regions on the face or limb of the visible disk, one wonders what the solar corona will look like. What will we see when the Moon blots out the Sun and the corona is revealed.

Unlike solar observers of old, we can look at the corona without waiting for an eclipse. We have both spacecraft and ground based telescopes equipped with coronagraphs. With these we can view the corona in real-time everyday!

Just up the hill from me is the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory. I know a couple folks that work there and have toured the facility. MLSO is a fairly modest telescope equipped with some very specialized instruments. This telescope stares at the Sun all day, every day, monitoring our star as part of a worldwide network of solar observatories.

Continue reading “The Solar Corona on Eclipse Day”