Celestial Bodies 157 
power each, providing of course there were a large enough 
ocean somewhere. 
STORMS ON THE SUN 
The bright glare of the sun masks its surface features from 
view. With a smoked glass or special optical instrument 
(spectrohelioscope, coronavisor) or during a total eclipse, 
certain features are visible which otherwise are impossible to 
see directly. For example, there are the great solar storms 
or “prominences ; clouds of exploding gas rising to a height 
of hundreds of thousands of miles above the sun’s surface and 
then subsiding and falling back into the sun. Sunspots are 
another apparition on the sun, visible as dark, black dots on 
the sun’s disk. They are whirlpools of cooler material on the 
sun. Since sunspots whirl around large quantities of magnet- 
ically charged particles, magnetic fields are set up. Sunspots 
act very much like large horseshoe magnets, the similarity is 
enhanced by the fact that they usually occur in pairs whirling 
in opposite directions and connected to one another below 
the surface. During a solar eclipse, when the bright disk of 
the sun is covered by the moon, long streamers of light are 
seen extending from the sun in all directions for distances of 
several solar diameters—a phenomenon named the corona. 
AND THE REST 
The sun is just one of the many myriads of stars in the 
universe. The reason why it appears so much brighter than 
other stars is that it is so much nearer to us. As a matter of 
fact, the sun is*just a medium kind of star—not one so in- 
tensely hot as the white-blue stars, nor one of the cooler giant 
red stars. With a little patience (and best with the aid of a 
good pair of binoculars) you will soon be able to recognize 
