This stuff just blows me away -- that is to say, getting solar data over the internet. The original Skylab data are still available -- you know, don't you, that our nation's first space station was also a solar observatory? -- but very hard to get nonetheless.
<p>Not that anyone is trying to stop you from getting to them -- it's just that the Skylab data are all sitting on film that was hand carried back from orbit by astronauts. So they're sitting in vaults at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. If you want to look at them, you have to phone up and ask the curators (they're nice guys), and then fly out to D.C. with your gear and your jeweler's loupe. Then you look at the picture on a light table and measure it with calipers. If you see something cool you send it down to the photo shop and iterate till the prints look right.
<p>SOHO and TRACE (and now RHESSI) data are available pretty much right away, pretty much anywhere. That means (for example) that the <a href="http://www.sec.noaa.gov">National Space Environment Center</a> can use the scientific data to predict power and radio outages here at Earth -- which in turn is a Good Thing.