NASA engineers stare at the sun to see shockwaves from supersonic flight

Before the eclipse this summer, NASA warned us over and over again not to stare directly at the sun — but now they’re doing just that. Its researchers have reinvented a photography technique more than a century old, using the sun itself as a backdrop in order to capture the shockwave produced by a new supersonic jet. Schlieren imaging was invented by a German physicist in the 19th century as a