Solar spacecraft 'SOHO' discovers its 5,000th comet

A bright orange circle covers almost the whole image, with a smaller disc in the middle. Out of the smaller disc protrude wisps of the Sun's atmosphere. To the upper right of the inner circle, an inset zooms in on a small square, with vertical lines surrounding a faint smudge.

In December 1995, an observatory traveled nearly a million miles from Earth as part of a $1 billion mission to study the sun.