The Sun as you never saw it before An action-packed motion picture from ESA's solar spacecraft SOHO astonishes the experts and will enthral the public. It shows the Sun at Christmas sailing in front of the stars of the Sagittarius constellation and the Milky Way, while blowing its solar wind outwards in all directions around it. During the movie, the Sun swallows a comet . In a subsequent unconnected event it emits a plainly visible puff of gas, in a large mass ejection. It masks the intense rays from the Sun's surface in order to reveal the much fainter glow of the solar atmosphere, or corona.
Many stars are brighter than the gas, and they create the background scene.
The results alter human perceptions of the Sun. Nearly 30 years ago, Apollo photographs of the Earth persuaded everyone of what until then they knew only in theory, that we live on a small planet. Similarly the new imagery shows our motion in orbit around the Sun, and depicts it as one star among many - yet close enough to fill the sky with emanations that engulf us. For many centuries even astrologers knew that the Sun was in Sagittarius in December and drifting towards the next zodiacal constellation, Capricornus. This was a matter of calculation only, because the Sun's own brightness prevented a direct view of the starfield.