I know you’ve heard about NASA’s STEREO mission to take 3D pictures of the sun, but you also know I have to post about it. I mean, come on…space and 3D?

They’re launching 2 satellites because in order to create stereoscopic imaging of the sun, they need to establish, basically, a left and right eye. The distance between these eyes — the camera lenses — is called the interocular.

When filming on your average movie set, the interocular is usually set at about 2 1/2 inches — the distance between the eyes of an average person. But by changing the interocular, you can also play with the sense of depth. Sometimes its necessary to shoot with an extremely wide interocular in order to create the filmic experience of depth for the viewing audience. For example, one director mounted left and right cameras on the opposite wing-tips of a small airplane and flew it over a large city. This produced a much greater sense of both depth and detail than a standard 2 1/2 inch interocular would in the same scenario. In essence, the director simply enlarges the viewer’s head, giving them bigger eyes wider apart to view the world.

Or the sun, as the case may be. To get a get a good interocular, to get the eyes wide enough apart to show us a stereoscopic image of the sun, NASA has to send them thousands of miles into space in opposite directions.

Of course, what this means is that NASA will eventually be able to create stereo images of the solar system. Now imagine that.

Meanwhile, dig these photos of solar flares at Space.com.

Also:

A July 2004 NASA news story about the creation of “the first three-dimensional (3D) view of massive solar eruptions called Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs). …The researchers analyzed ordinary two-dimensional images from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft in a new way to yield the 3D images.” Link includes downloadable Mpeg video and hi-res TIF images.

The Mars Rover 3D Image Gallery @ NASA — anaglyphic 3D images from Spirit and Opportunity, which are both still hanging on long after they were expected to keel over.