NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, SDO, has been observing the sun continuously for more than a decade. From its orbit in space around Earth, SDO has captured more than 425 million high-resolution images of the sun, totaling 20 million gigabytes of data in the past 10 years. This information has led to many discoveries about how our nearest star works and how it influences the solar system and drives space weather.
images and video by NASA SDO
This 10-year time span is a compilation of images taken by SDO every hour, condensing a decade of the sun into 61 minutes. The photos are taken at a wavelength of 17.1 nanometers, which is an extreme ultraviolet wavelength showing the sun’s outermost atmospheric layer – the corona. In the video, viewers can see the rise and fall of activity that occurs as part of the sun’s 11-year solar cycle, including key events like transiting planets and eruptions.
In its 10 years, SDO has kept an eye on the sun, trying to capture everything that happens to it, but due to circumstances it cannot control, it has missed a few moments. If you find black squares in the video, it may be because Earth or Moon are dwarfing SDO as it passes between the spacecraft and the sun. In 2016, a longer power outage occurred when an AIA instrument suffered a temporary problem that resolved within a week, and sometimes when the sun is off-center it is because SDO was calibrating its instruments. SDO continues to gaze at the sun, hoping to learn even more.
project information:
Name: a decade of sunshine
kind: video
Captured by: NASA SDO
juliana neira I designboom
June 28, 2020
