This is one of the reasons I love the Internet - it allows people with obscure hobbies or abilities to do really cool things.

Take this guy. He has a hobby, he likes to make maps of places on the Earth from satellite photos. One day he sees some imagery of Titan (a moon of Saturn), courtesy of JPL and the Cassini-Huygens mission. He spots something interesting: a methane sea with a complex shoreline.

So he whips up a really cool map of the Unnamed Methane Sea on Titan. Personally, I think they should name it after him.

You may not know it, but the sun has a regular solar "cycle" of activity. These cycles last anywhere from 9 to 14 years in length, and the sun tends to have a slightly different activity level per cycle. These variations can have a big impact for life on Earth.

Our curious and inquisitive nature has prompted us to loft a special satellite into space to monitor the sun: the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). For the first time in history, SOHO has monitored a solar cycle from start to (nearly) finish, and it's a pretty darned cool picture:

You can find more cool images here.

You can read more about the solar cycle at Wikipedia (warning, serious science content).

And in case you didn't know it, we are on the verge of moving from solar cycle 23 to cycle 24. It has all of the sun watchers on the edge of their seats in excitement.