The Sun from a UK desk

The daily disk on our homepage is an editorial illustration in the style of an HMI continuum image: spots, faculae, a working star. Live full-disk data live at NASA SDO and SIDC. UK hardware and science sit at RAL Space and in the Solar Orbiter magnetometer team at Imperial College London.

What we care about for Britain is not only beauty. It is whether an active region can throw an M- or X-class flare, whether a coronal hole is on the Earth-facing disk, and whether a CME is likely to glance the magnetosphere. Those questions feed MOSWOC and, later, BGS magnetometers.

A coronal mass ejection is a magnetic cloud, not a promise of colour over the Midlands. Sometimes it drives a G-scale storm. Sometimes it only sweeps galactic cosmic rays aside and shows up as a Forbush decrease in a neutron monitor. Report both. A desk that only files aurora will miss half the physics.

Inner-heliosphere literacy also now includes BepiColombo at Mercury, where a tiny magnetosphere has almost no standoff from the same wind. Earth is the mansion. Mercury is the bedsit. The verbs are shared.

Read: Solar Orbiter's UK magnetometer, coronal holes and HF, F10.7, Forbush decreases, SMILE's magnetopause camera.

The left-hand rail remains an editorial snapshot, not an operational feed. Use SDO and SIDC for the live disk.