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SOHO CD-ROM Shows Sun in Great Light
By Daniel Sorid
Staff Writer
posted: 12:19 pm ET
29 March 2000
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soho_cd_000328 Culling images from five years of sun watching, the European Space Agency (ESA) has created a CD-ROM dedicated to the discoveries of the sun-pointing Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft. SOHO: Exploring the Sun offers up the best of SOHO's images, turning the sun -- usually something to avoid looking at -- into art. The CD would make an extraordinary learning tool in schools. Younger students can enjoy the brilliant pictures of the sun, while older students can dive into the history of how the universe was conceived through the ages. At times, however, the CD's interface is less than intuitive, which could pose problems for younger students. 
A picture of the sun taken by SOHO An awe-inspiring introduction takes viewers on a trip to the sun, and then back to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where SOHO is controlled. Users can then enter the image gallery, read about the history of astronomers' conception of the universe, or learn about the SOHO spacecraft. If it errs anywhere, Exploring the Sun fails to deliver comprehensible captions to its stunning solar images. One caption, for a fascinating picture of wavy, fiery lines, reads like an astrophysics journal: "Temporal variations of the amplitude of solar p-model by VIRGO." 
A historical page on Exploring the Sun But this confusion is made up for with the sheer volume of pictures, links to relevant web pages, a comprehensive glossary, and generous historical information. Finding the CD in the United States could be a problem. Currently, the ESA has not found a method for distributing the CD in the U.S., except by responding to individual requests and linking to an extremely large (500-Mb) downloadable file.In Europe, the CD can be found as an insert in select magazines.
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