Big Bear Solar Observatory is home to the world’s largest aperture and highest resolution solar telescope. The New Solar Telescope has a 1.6 meter primary mirror and is housed in the first facility-class solar telescope made in the USA in a generation. It saw first light in early 2009 and uses the latest technologies to make the highest possible resolution studies of the Sun and its dynamics, which profoundly affect life on Earth. The Sun provides warmth, but its magnetic storms can damage satellites and disrupt the power grid and communications. The telescope is located in the lake because the lake provides a natural inversion that minimizes image blurring caused by atmospheric turbulence. A line-of-sight magnetic field measurement from September 23, 2010 using the New Solar Telescope’s Infrared Imaging Magnetograph covered a field of view about 30,000 by 18,000 miles, showed opposing north-south magnetic polarities as bright and dark colors, and resolved magnetic features less than 150 miles in diameter. This magnetogram was the best ever from Big Bear, with resolution equivalent to resolving a row of dimes twenty miles away. Precisely measuring the Sun’s magnetic field is critical to understanding solar dynamics. A July 2, 2010 image showed a small sunspot surrounded by its penumbra and then by the Sun’s granular field, whose individual bright cells can be as large as California, with Earth slightly smaller than the sunspot; Ciel et Espace called it the most precise picture of the Sun ever, and National Geographic’s editors selected it as one of the ten Best Space Pictures of 2010. The off-axis design allows light to be focused without a shadow from the secondary mirror, and the optical path leads to lower-level labs where instruments correct atmospheric distortion, measure magnetic fields, and record solar images. The observatory also has three major ongoing instrumentation projects for the 1.6 meter solar telescope: a fully cryogenic spectrograph, visible light and infrared magnetographs, and next generation adaptive optics. It operates an observing station for the GONG Project, part of the National Solar Observatory’s global network of six telescopes studying the Sun’s structure through its internal oscillations. A small dome houses the full-disk Hydrogen Alpha telescope, which tracks solar dynamics, and the Earthshine telescope, which observes the dark of the Moon to measure Earth’s large-scale reflectance, a critical climate parameter. A hydrogen alpha image of a sunspot reveals the dynamics of the solar chromosphere, where long dark streaks are plasma jets carrying material higher into the solar atmosphere and jets from bright magnetic regions at the penumbra’s outer edge feed solar wind that constantly buffets Earth’s environment.