Solstice Celebration

Season's greetings! Today or tomorrow, depending on your time zone, the Sun reaches its northernmost point in planet Earth's sky marking a season change and the first solstice of the year 2004. In celebration, consider this delightfully detailed, brightly colored image of the active Sun . From the EIT instrument onboard the space-based SOHO observatory, the tantalizing picture is a false-color composite of three images all made in extreme ultraviolet light. Each individual image highlights a different temperature regime in the upper solar atmosphere and was assigned a specific color; red at 2 million, green at 1.5 million, and blue at 1 million degrees C. The combined image shows bright active regions strewn across the solar disk, which would otherwise appear as dark groups of sunspot s in visible light images, along with some magnificent plasma loops and an immense prominence at the right hand solar limb.