Oooh, let’s break out our old-school 3-D glasses and stare at the sun, baby! Thanks to NASA’s STEREO spacecraft we’re being given a chance to see our Sun like we’ve never seen it before.

The dual Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft — launched October 25, 2006 — have finished a seriously intense set of maneuvers, which included a lunar flyby and have now positioned themselves in their respective mission orbits. The twin *eyes* now orbit the Sun, with one slightly ahead of Earth and one slightly behind, separating from each other by approximately 45 degrees per year. This slight offset of each observatory’s trajectory is meant to mimic the differential in human vision, which creates our 3-D depth perception.

“The improvement with STEREO’s 3-D view is like going from a regular X-ray to a 3-D CAT scan in the medical field,” said Michael Kaiser, the mission’s project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

So go check out the 3-D images of the Sun generated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, CA. They’re the only 3-D view of our Sun that won’t burn out your retinas.

Source: NASA