A 3.6-ton mirror three inches thick sits on a Maui volcano collecting sunlight, and keeping it from cooking itself takes seven miles of coolant pipe, thirteen separate temperatures and about a swimmin

Every kid who has ever owned a magnifying glass learns the same lesson in about four seconds. Point it at the sun, hold it over a dry leaf, and the leaf starts smoking. Nobody has to explain the physics. Now scale that lens up to 13.9 feet across and bolt it to the top of a volcano. The party trick becomes an engineering problem, because the instrument you built to look at the sun is also an instrument perfectly designed to destroy itself. That is the daily situation at the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, which sits just above 10,000 feet on Haleakalā, on Maui, and which is the largest solar telescope on Earth. On August 5 the National Solar Observatory announced that the machine had caught something on the sun's surface nobody had ever managed to photograph.