Jeffrey Newmark, a solar physicist at NASA, described the corona like a head of hair, with intermingling strands of grey, brown, and black - each color representing a different temperature. Scientists are also interested in why temperatures vary so wildly even within the corona. Why, astronomers ask, does the sun's surface burn at a relatively cool tens of thousands of degrees Fahrenheit, while the corona surrounding it burns millions of degrees hotter? The extreme differences throughout the star are not easy to explain. The blue side shows plasma burning in the sun's extended atmosphere, or corona, at 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit. The red side, here for example, shows a layer of the sun's surface in which material burns at about 140,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The 4,000-pound satellite is equipped with an ultraviolet telescope that reveals and color codes these disparities, day to day. One of these mysteries involves the question of why certain parts of the sun burn so much hotter than others. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is a satellite roughly the size of a pickup truck, operated by NASA and the European Space Agency, that orbits the sun and beams back clues to the fiery globeвЂ™s scorching mysteries. But some of the most intriguing solar snapshots captured on Sunday will come from a spacecraft flying a million miles away. Each year on the summer solstice people flock to Stonehenge, England, to photograph the sun's rays as they dramatically peek through the stones.

Secret of the soulstice