NCAR’s Mesa Laboratory saw thousands of comings and goings in its first few years, but only one arrival needed a new room to accommodate it.

For all the blazing glory of the visible Sun, it’s the outer atmosphere, or corona—far hotter than the interior, yet invisible to the naked eye—that most intrigued solar scientists during NCAR’s first years

With a new central laboratory in place, NCAR and UCAR progressed from their exuberant youth into an eventful adolescence in the 1970s.

The nineteen sixties first snapshot.

The nineteen sixties decade.