- NASA released a 10-year time lapse video after their Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft took millions of images of the sun.
- The 61-minute video shows the sun’s fiery activity while in orbit.
- NASA’s spacecraft documented one image every 0.75 seconds.
Here’s your cool bit of science news from NASA: The space agency recently released a time lapse of the sun as it orbited in space over the course of a decade.
Their Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft has been continuously watching the sun for the past 10 years, taking 425 million images with high-resolution quality to bring us closer to the ball of gas than we could have ever imagined. The video shows lively movement on its surface, including solar flares and magnetic explosions.
From its launch on Feb. 11, 2010 with a goal “to understand the solar variations that influence life on Earth and humanity’s technological systems,” SDO documented millions of images, taking one every 0.75 seconds.
Comprised of one photo per hour, the time lapse captured images at an extreme ultraviolet wavelength of 17.1 nanometers, displaying a fantastic view of the sun’s hard-to-see corona. As the sun’s outermost part of its atmosphere, the corona tends to be overshadowed by the the star’s bright light, but can typically be seen during a total solar eclipse and is clearly shown here.
The time lapse also bears witness to the sun’s 11-year solar cycle where its magnetic field actually does a 180, flipping so that the north and south poles swap places. This cycle plays a huge part in the kind of activity experienced on the sun’s surface like sunspots and solar flares, as well as other kinds of eruptions depicted in the video.
There are only a few blackout moments in the video that took place due to a technical issue or if the Earth or moon came between SDO and the sun. (Want to spot an eclipse in this video? Look closely around the 22- and 53-minute marks.) The brief pause does little to hinder the magnificence seen in this 61-minute video.
While June 2020 marks a decade of SDO closely watching the sun, NASA promises they’ll continue to monitor it for “years to come.”
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