What if you could build a house in space just to spy on the Sun?

The Sun Gets Its Close-Up: Skylab's Solar Mission!

When astronauts became the ultimate sun detectives

NASA launched Skylab, America's first space station, to spy on the Sun from space!

On May 3, 1973, something AMAZING happened! NASA launched Skylab, America's very first space station, and it had a super special mission — to study the Sun like never before!

Imagine having a house floating in space, about 270 miles above Earth. That's how high Skylab orbited! It was as big as a three-bedroom house and weighed as much as 12 elephants. Pretty wild, right?

But here's the coolest part: Skylab carried special telescopes that could look directly at the Sun without getting fried! Scientists on Earth had been curious about our star for centuries, but our atmosphere blocks a lot of the Sun's rays. Up in space? No problem!

Three different crews of astronauts lived on Skylab, and they took over 175,000 pictures of the Sun! They discovered amazing things called coronal holes — giant dark spots on the Sun that shoot out super-fast particles into space. They also watched solar flares, which are like enormous explosions on the Sun's surface!

💡 Skylab astronauts took so many photos of the Sun that if you looked at one every second, it would take you almost 49 hours to see them all!