The sun comes up every day - something ordinary we don't think about much. In the top stories today is a picture of the sun's surface - it looks like gold crackle paint. Like something I'd find on an old rail car.
"The Daniel K Inouye Solar Telescope on Hawaii has released pictures that show features as small as 30km across.
This is remarkable when set against the scale of our star, which has a diameter of about 1.4 million km (870,000 miles) and is 149 million km from Earth.
The cell-like structures are roughly the size of the US state of Texas. They are convecting masses of hot, excited gas, or plasma.
The bright centres are where this solar material is rising; the surrounding dark lanes are where plasma is cooling and sinking."
It made me think of California - land of sunshine inside the mountains on the coast. My father told me that you can plan a picnic for any day in the summer months in Fresno far in advance and always know it would be a sunny day. He experienced the summer sun as unrelenting and he was happy to come back to Niagara.
This is Filoli, south of San Francisco just inside the mountain range at Half Moon Bay.
