By Galileo’s careful hand, sunspot details are exquisite,
Through eye of forehead, eye of mind beholds what body can not visit.
If only he could see the sights now rendered from Earth’s outer space,
Ultraviolet sunscapes – Oh, to see his raptured face!
High above Earth’s atmosphere, IRIS probes the edges of our star,
A telescope in orbit, through its lenses, we see far.
Six thousand Kelvin screams the surface, roiling plasma, like hellish seas,
Hotter still, the sun’s corona: millions of degrees!
Mysterious, this source of heat that drives the solar wind our way …
High-speed jets, coronal loops and nanoflares may be at play.
What a thrill to gaze through space with spectrographic eyes,
Fueled by human wonder and a zeal to probe the skies.
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Further reading:
Eyeing the Sun, Science Magazine
This is one in a series of poems written by Katherine Allen, a researcher in geochemistry and paleoclimate at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University.
