Sun Science Forever First Class Postage Stamps

Sun Science puts NASA's imagery of the sun on stamps, printed with a foil treatment so the flares and the corona catch the light as the envelope moves. It is one of the few recent issues where the printing does real work - flat on a screen the images look like abstract color, and in the hand they do not. The Postal Service dedicated the set at the Greenbelt Main Post Office in Maryland, a few minutes from the Goddard Space Flight Center, in 2021. Sheets of 20.

This one sells to science classrooms, observatory gift shops and the people who run them. Physics and astronomy departments put them on department mail, museums use them for membership renewals, and parents of a certain kind of ten-year-old buy a sheet and never see it again. The foil is worth seeing in person before you decide how many sheets to buy; it does not photograph.