HAO News

The K-Cor coronagraph instrument at the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory on Hawai’i is used by a team of two scientists to record the rare transit of Venus across the Sun's corona. Sky & Telescope describes the movie captured by Alfred de Wijn (High Altitude Observatory, NCAR) and Gunther Können (Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute). 

High Altitude Observatory (HAO) staff was invited by UCAR Science Education to present “Space Weather” to the public at the Little Shop of Physics 29th Annual Open House at the Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

Paul Bryans tells Sun Superheroes that a solar eclipse is an opportunity to understand and study the Sun's magnetism. 

Physics World presents an article co-authored by HAO senior scientists, Philip Judge and Roberto Casini, on the challenges for the "budding research scientist" when selecting a meaningful research field and future career.

Jenna Samra had a very extraordinary scientific research experience while visiting Colorado this summer. The recent August 21 total solar eclipse provided Jenna a unique opportunity to test an instrument that she helped design and build, the airborne infrared spectrometer or AIR-Spec.

HAO scientists observed the August 21st total eclipse with a suite of three instruments with financial assistance provided by NASA. The experiments were intended to learn about the magnetic and thermal structure of the solar corona with the goal of understanding how the Sun generates weather in space.

For over a decade, Joan Burkepile has participated in the STEM conference for middle school girls called “Expanding Your Horizons,” at CU Boulder. These one-day hands-on workshops are led by women professionals and are designed to be fun and exploratory.

Summer, 2017—We hosted twelve summer students at HAO. They worked on a range of projects, from building telescopes to employing numerical models to analyzing observations and simulation data. Meet the students and hear their stories.

If you have visited the High Altitude Observatory (HAO) at NCAR in Boulder, CO, you may recall seeing the Maunder’s original butterfly diagram. The chart resembles three butterflies traveling west. Drawn by Annie S.D. Maunder and E. Walter Maunder, it demonstrated for the first time the movement of sunspot emergence from the poles toward the equator over the sun's 11-year cycle.