This summer, the U.S. Postal Service will release a dazzling new collection of stamps. They’ll feature colorful images of the sun captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). The spacecraft has been studying the sun’s activity since 2010.
The SDO takes photos using different wavelengths of light, including ones beyond the range of human vision. The pictures are colorized to create images people can see. This allows scientists to better observe different features on the sun, including flashes of brightness called solar flares and dark, cooler patches called sunspots.
“With these stamps, we can bring sun science to every household,” says Lika Guhathakurta, an astrophysicist at NASA who leads the SDO mission.