Coimbra Solar Observatory
ESA TV Exchanges
On 6 April 2007, the contribution of Working Group II to the ""Climate Change 2007"" assessment report of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) will be presented to the press in Brussels.
This is why ESA TV Service releases three new Exchanges on aspects of climate change and space - this is the last of the three stories:
The Sun is essential for life on Earth, but in many ways the star at the centre of our Solar System is also a mystery. For the past 80 years, the Coimbra Observatory in Portugal has been building up a scientific treasure trove of pictures of the Sun, which are now helping modern day scientists to know more about sudden changes of the Sun that can even have effects for the climate on Earth.
The script is online as a PDF file under http://television.esa.int/photos/EbS51510.pdf
A WMV preview clip is online under http://esatv-movies.e-vision.nl/videos/mphi/coimbra_23-01-07_wmphigh.wmv

Coimbra Solar Observatory: historic images go online
10:00:00 Tape start
10:00:30 A-Roll start
10:00:40 Some two hundred kilometres north of Lisbon, in the centre of Portugal, lies the sun drenched town of Coimbra, well known for its university and its solar observatory.
10:00:52 Mankind has always been fascinated by our Sun, an enormous thermo nuclear reactor which for the last 4.5 billion years has irradiated light and energy throughout the solar system.
10:01:05 Over the years, astronomers at the Coimbra Observatory have become historians of Earthís star, recording and documenting its cycles of activity.
10:01:16 Clip Joao Fernandez, Astronomer Coimbra Observatory (in Portugese) ""What is remarkable is that all the observations we have amassed, more than 30 thousand pictures of the Sun, have been made with basically the same instrument, a spectrograph. 80 years of images, with the same criteria, which allow us to study all the solar phenomena, such as sun spots, prot