Solar physics

Islam requires its followers to pray five times a day, at specific position of the Sun in the sky.

In the late 10th century, Iranian astronomer Abu-Mahmud Khojandi built a massive observatory near Tehran.

This, plus de-urbanisation and diseases such as the Black Death led to a decline in scientific knowledge in Medieval Europe, especially in the early Middle Ages.

During this period, observations of the Sun were taken either in relation to the zodiac, or to assist in building places of worship such as churches and cathedrals.

In the autumn of 1611, Johannes Fabricius wrote the first book on sunspots, De Maculis in Sole Observatis ("On the spots observed in the Sun").

[citation needed] The Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society boasts 555 members (as of May 2007), compared to several thousand in the parent organization.

Helios-A and Helios-B are a pair of spacecraft launched in December 1974 and January 1976 from Cape Canaveral, as a joint venture between the German Aerospace Center and NASA.

They included instruments to measure the solar wind, magnetic fields, cosmic rays, and interplanetary dust.

[11] A publicly funded mission led by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, the HINODE satellite, launched in 2006, consists of a coordinated set of optical, extreme ultraviolet and X-ray instruments.

Twenty-two institutions are collaborating on the ATST project, with the main funding agency being the National Science Foundation.

The Big Bear Observatory is one of several facilities operated by the Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT).