From Earth, we always look towards the Sun's equator. This year, the ESA-led Solar Orbiter mission broke free of this ‘standard’ viewpoint by tilting its orbit to 17° – out of the ecliptic plane where the planets and all other Sun-watching spacecraft reside. Now for the first time ever, we can clearly see the Sun’s unexplored poles.  

This video starts with the Sun as viewed from Earth. The grey images were taken by the SWAP extreme ultraviolet telescope on ESA’s Proba-2 spacecraft. The dashed red-green lines show the solar latitudes and longitudes (Stonyhurst grid), while the solid yellow lines show the centre of Earth’s view.  

We then rotate to Solar Orbiter’s tilted view, shown in yellow, and zoom in to the Sun’s south pole. Solar Orbiter used its Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument to take these images.  

What you see is million-degree charged gas moving in the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona. Every now and then, a bright jet or plume lights up this gas.  

On 23 March 2025, Solar Orbiter was viewing the Sun from an angle of 17° below the Sun’s equator. Each orbit around the Sun, the spacecraft swings between solar latitudes of -17° and +17°, so it can study both the Sun’s south and north poles, and everything in between.  

Read the full story. 

Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA. The Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument is led by the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB). ESA’s Proba-2 is a space mission dedicated to the demonstration of innovative technologies. Its extreme ultraviolet telescope (SWAP) is led by the Royal Observatory of Belgium.