From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

SUNSPOT, N. MEX.: senior correspondent J. Madeleine Nash has been eager to report a story from that intriguing dateline since she learned of its existence at a gathering of astronomers last year. For this week's cover, Nash finally got her wish. "Sunspot isn't properly a town," she says, but a "singularly beautiful place, high on a mountain peak, that is one of the world's most important centers of solar research." The day after her arrival, Nash looked through a telescope "longer than a football field" to view the rising sun. She glimpsed a stunning, white-hot world swept by turbulence that made it look "grainy, as if sprinkled with sand." At the same time, she saw that "gargantuan sunspots had erupted like a rash" on either side of the solar equator.

This week's story may be the hottest Nash has ever covered, but as a reporter specializing in science and technology, she has contributed to covers on subjects, ranging from supercomputers to supernovas, that have proved as challenging as the sun. A "lopsided liberal-arts graduate" of Bryn Mawr College who joined TIME in 1965, Nash credits her fascination with such topics to a firm belief that "nothing is so difficult that it can't be understood with a little effort." Her marriage to a physicist helps, allowing her "to absorb a feel for how scientists think and operate, virtually by osmosis."

As the sun story unfolded, it made for some odd conversations among staffers in the San Francisco bureau, where Nash is currently based. Office manager Olivia Stewart found herself fielding enigmatic tips about solar activity. Many came from Patrick McIntosh, a solar physicist in Boulder. As Nash tells it, "Olivia would say with mock concern that 'Pat McIntosh called again to say the sun was acting kind of strange.' Then she would burst out laughing." Last week, as the story was going to press, the sun graciously cooperated by ejecting a huge arch of gas that some astronomers pronounced the largest explosion they have ever witnessed. That's the kind of message Nash appreciates.