Sunny Days: On rainy spring days, when you long for a glimpse of the sun, don't despair: the friendly folks at NASA and at ES

Sunny Days: On rainy spring days, when you long for a glimpse of the sun, don't despair: the friendly folks at NASA and at ESA (the other Internet space giant, the European Space Agency) have put help up on the web.

For (almost) real-time images of the sun, visit the ultimate "web cam", aboard the ESA/NASA SOHO satellite at http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime-images.html where you can see solar corona, sunspots, and images of the sun's violent surface and atmospheric activity -- click on the images to enlarge them, or follow links on this and on linked pages.

For more info on SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, go to http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/. (Caution -- the real-time Screen Saver advertised on this web site seems to be unstable.)

For more on ESA, go to http://sci.esa.int/index.cfm.