Blue Sun Glaring

Explanation : The Sun is a bubbling ball of extremely hot gas. In this false-color picture , light blue regions are extremely hot - over 1 million degrees , while dark blue regions are slightly cooler. The camera filter used was highly sensitive to the emission of highly charged iron ions , which trace the magnetic field of the Sun . The rich structure of the image shows the great complexity of the Sun 's inner corona . A small active region can be seen just to the right and above center. This picture was taken in ultraviolet (extremely blue) light by the Extreme-ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) on board the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft, which is orbiting the Sun just ahead of the Earth , at the L1 point . SOHO was launched in 1995 and will continually monitor the Sun for several years.