Thursday, June 24, 2021

Imperfections are Beautiful

Around 1610, Galileo added another item to his list of first-human-ever-to list:  He observed Sunspots on the Sun.  

Not only did this indicate imperfection in the heavens (in the most heavenly of objects no less) but the Sunspots moved on successive days and thus indicated the Sun itself rotated.

Now, many felt that this was a blow to perfection and to the concept of heavenly perfection specifically.  But it seems it was a gateway to the greater beauty that science can reveal to us.

Four hundred years later, we have people who study the Solar Atmosphere and Solar Weather (Heliophysics).  And, now the post office has wowed us with the beauty of Sun in an amazing array of images (each image is an artistic rendition of a colorized photo of the sun taken outside of the visible spectrum (IR, radio, etc.):

From the USPS:

"Printed with a foil treatment that adds a glimmer to the stamps, the images on these stamps come from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, a spacecraft launched in February 2010 to keep a constant watch on the sun from geosynchronous orbit above Earth. ...

One of the stamps highlights sunspots, two feature images of coronal holes, two show coronal loops, two depict plasma blasts, one is a view of an active sun that emphasizes its magnetic fields, and two show different views of a solar flare."

Beautifully imperfect is the source of all energy for us imperfect beings, no?


(Even my imperfect picture with the flash of my phone showing in the center of the picture just seems to imply a sunlike effect in the middle of the array of pictures!)


More info on the stamps here: https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2021/0618-usps-issues-sun-science-forever-stamps.htm


 

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