WHY STUDY THE SUN?

Detrick adjusting mirrors to beam the sunlight down into the telescope.

When I was in college I never really wanted to do anything with the Sun or stellar-wise. I thought it was pretty boring. But when I came here I was amazed at the amount that there is to study on the Sun, and right now we're heading toward Solar Maximum and that is why there is even more activity.

There's just so much going on, so many dynamical things happening on the Sun that affect the Earth, and now I really have an interest in studying that-the different processes that make the magnetic field that we actually image here at Kitt Peak, and what's actually going on inside the Sun, and that's exactly what the NSO is really studying right now.

I am really interested in looking at prominences, and these are akin to clouds in the atmosphere of Earth, but they are clouds of hydrogen sitting above the surface of the Sun: magnetic fields actually support the prominences, and magnetic fields thread through them.