English: It was a quiet day on the Sun in September of 2000. The above image from
NASA's sun-observing
TRACE spacecraft shows, however, that even during "off days" the Sun's surface is a busy place. Shown in ultraviolet light, the relatively cool dark regions have temperatures of thousands of degrees.
A large sunspot group is visible as the bright area near the horizon. The bright glowing gas flowing around the sunspots has a temperature of over one million degrees Celsius (1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit). The high temperatures are thought to be related to the rapidly changing magnetic field loops that channel solar plasma.
And from http://trace.lmsal.com/POD/TRACEpodarchive4.html:
A quiet day on the Sun. No spectacular flares or mass ejections, no odd filaments moving, and nevertheless the image of AR 9169, with the much smaller AR 9167 just ahead of it, is very pretty. This image was taken with TRACE in the 171Å passband, showing the bright emission of the gas at about 1 million degrees, with the cooler material around 10,000 degrees showing up as dark, absorbing structures.