Any image or view of the Sun ever seen by human eyes has been of the region around the Sun's equator, until now.
Feast your eyes on these brand new images and videos of the Sun captured by the Solar Orbiter spacecraft.
These are the first ever images showing the Sun's south pole, and are a result of Solar Orbiter's new orbit around our host star.
Solar Orbiter's unique view
Solar Orbiter is a mission led by the European Space Agency that's captured images of the Sun closer than any spacecraft before it.
The spacecraft launched on 10 February 2020 and performed its first close approach to the Sun in the middle of June 2020.
In February 2025, Solar Orbiter began the ‘high latitude’ part of its journey around the Sun, tilting its orbit to an angle of 17° relative to the Sun's equator.
All other Sun-observing spacecraft before it – and the planets of the Solar System, for that matter – orbit the Sun in the ecliptic plane, tilted at most 7° from the solar equator.
The exception was the ESA/NASA Ulysses mission, which flew over the Sun's poles but wasn't equipped with a camera.
Thanks to its new tilted orbit, Solar Orbiter is the first to photograph the Sun’s poles from outside the ecliptic plane.
The ecliptic plane represents the flat plane of the Solar System planets' orbits around the Sun, and is a result of how our Solar System formed from a dusty disk surrounding our newborn Sun.
By tilting its orbit beyond this plane, Solar Orbiter is capturing images of the Sun from an angle never seen before.
Comparing Solar Orbiter's orbital angle
The European Space Agency released the video above, which compares Solar Orbiter’s view of the Sun (in yellow) with a view from Earth (grey) on 23 March 2025.
Solar Orbiter was viewing the Sun from its orbital angle of 17° below the solar equator, giving it a view of the Sun's south pole.
And as if that wasn't enough, the spacecraft is set to tilt its orbit even further over the coming years.
Seeing the Sun’s south pole
The collage of images above shows Solar Orbiter's view of the Sun’s south pole on 16–17 March 2025, from an angle 15° below the solar equator.
Images were captured using three of Solar Orbiter’s scientific instruments, to give solar scientists views of the Sun in varying wavelengths and reveal a range of features.
The instruments are the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI), the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), and the Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument.
"We didn’t know what exactly to expect from these first observations – the Sun’s poles are literally terra incognita," says Sami Solanki who leads the PHI instrument team from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany.
Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager photographs the Sun in visible light (top left) and produces maps of the Sun’s surface magnetic field (top centre).
Extreme Ultraviolet Imager captures images of the Sun in ultraviolet (top right), giving scientists a view of the corona, which is the Sun's outer atmosphere.
SPICE (bottom row) captures light from different temperatures of charged gas, giving scientists a view of the different layers of the Sun's atmosphere.
Solar scientists say studying these images in different wavelengths enables them to learn more about how material moves in the Sun’s outer layers, revealing new, mysterious patterns that reval how the Sun – and stars like it in general – operate.
It also tells them more about the solar cycle, which is the 11-year pattern of peak and trough that the Sun goes through, resulting in periods of quiet and periods of heightened activity in the form of increased solar flares, sunspots and coronal mass ejections.
The Sun's South pole is a mess
Solar Orbiter scientists say these observations show them the magnetic field at the Sun's south pole is a "mess".
A normal magnet that we would use on Earth has a north and south pole. But the Sun's magnetic field at the south pole contains both north and south polarity magnetic fields.
Scientists say this happens for a short time during each solar cycle, at solar maximum, when the Sun’s magnetic field flips and is most active.
Once the field does flip, a 'single polarity' should build up and take over the Sun’s poles.
The Sun is currently at solar maximum, but will reach solar minimum in about 5 years, during which time its magnetic field is most orderly and the Sun displays lowest levels of activity.
“How exactly this build-up occurs is still not fully understood, so Solar Orbiter has reached high latitudes at just the right time to follow the whole process from its unique and advantageous perspective,” says Solanki.
Solar Orbiter found that the strongest magnetic fields are in two bands, either side of the Sun’s equator.
In the image above, dark red and dark blue regions show active regions, where the magnetic field gets concentrated in sunspots on the Sun’s surface.
The Sun’s south and north poles contain both red and blue patches which, say scientists, shows the Sun’s magnetic field has a "complex and ever-changing structure".
Movement on the Sun
The SPICE instrument has been able to measure how fast clumps of material are moving across the Sun.
It does this by measuring light emitted by chemical elements from the Sun – hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, neon and magnesium – at known temperatures.
SPICE data has been used to create a map showing how solar material moves within a specific layer of the Sun.
It's known as a ‘Doppler measurement’, named after the Doppler effect that causes an ambulance siren's pitch to change as it passes by the observer.
This enables scientists to track how fast the carbon ions are moving towards and away from Solar Orbiter.
Images below show a comparison of the location and movement of particles in a thin layer called the 'transition region’.
Here, the Sun's temperature rapdily increases from 10,000 °C to hundreds of thousands of degrees.
The top view is a radiance map showing the locations of clumps of carbon ions on the Sun.
The bottom image is a velocity map, blue and red showing how fast the carbon ions are moving towards and away from the spacecraft, respectively.
Darker patches of colour show material flowing faster as a result of small plumes or jets.
Doppler measurements can also tell scientists how particles are ejected outwards into space by the solar wind, a stream of charged particles emanating from the Sun.
"Doppler measurements of solar wind setting off from the Sun by current and past space missions have been hampered by the grazing view of the solar poles. Measurements from high latitudes, now possible with Solar Orbiter, will be a revolution in solar physics," says SPICE team leader, Frédéric Auchère from the University of Paris-Saclay (France).
What next?
Solar Orbiter mission scientists say a lot of the data from this latest release has yet to be studied.
And the complete dataset of Solar Orbiter's first full ‘pole-to-pole' flight past the Sun is expected to be available to scientists by Ocotber 2025.
"This is just the first step of Solar Orbiter's 'stairway to heaven': in the coming years, the spacecraft will climb further out of the ecliptic plane for ever better views of the Sun's polar regions," says Daniel Müller, ESA’s Solar Orbiter project scientist.
"These data will transform our understanding of the Sun’s magnetic field, the solar wind, and solar activity."
"Today we reveal humankind’s first-ever views of the Sun’s pole" says Prof. Carole Mundell, ESA's Director of Science.
"The Sun is our nearest star, giver of life and potential disruptor of modern space and ground power systems, so it is imperative that we understand how it works and learn to predict its behaviour.
"These new unique views from our Solar Orbiter mission are the beginning of a new era of solar science."
