Far Side Of The Sun, First Complete Image Taken On June 1, 2011.

The image is aligned so that solar north is directly up. The seam between the two images is inclined because the plane of Earth’s — and STEREO’s — orbit, known as the “ecliptic”, is inclined with respect to the sun’s axis of rotation. The data was collected by STEREO’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imagers in the SECCHI instrument suites.

STEREO was built and is operated for NASA by the Applied Physical Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University; the spacecraft were launched on October 25, 2006 aboard a Delta II. The SECCHI instrument suite is a collaboration led by the Naval Research Laboratory, and the EUVI instruments were built by the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory.

The solar sphere as observed by STEREO and the Solar Dynamics Observatory on January 31, 2011. Because the STEREO separation was still slightly less than 180o at that time, a narrow gap on the far side of the Sun has been interpolated to simulate the full 360o view. The gap and quality of farside imaging will improve even more in the days and weeks ahead.