Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Jamie Carter is an award-winning reporter who covers the night sky. The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft is on a journey.

is the average distance between Earth and the sun, which equals 92,955,807 miles or 149,597,870 kilometers. The reason for that is that Solar Orbiter's goal is to take images of the sun.

In the evening, a gigantic bowl with thousands of pinprick holes is inverted over the Earth—or so the thinking went. The sun, suspended above ... images from NASA’s Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra ...