Astrophysicists watch the Sun

High in the Colorado Rockies at an altitude where some fliers put on oxygen masks, observers keep daily watch on the sun with a special type of instrument. The High Altitude Observatory of Harvard University and University of Colorado, the highest permanent astronomical laboratory in the world, houses a very new type of solar telescope, the coronagraph. The coronagraph, as its name implies, records the corona, the faint outer envelope of the solar atmosphere which makes an eclipse of the sun a spectacle of awesome beauty.