NASA has compiled more than 87,000 high-resolution images of the sun taken over the past decade from its Solar Dynamics Observatory to create an incredibly detailed time-lapse movie.
The video was released to mark the 10th anniversary of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite, which has been photographing the sun from its orbit around Earth since 2010.
To create the time lapse, NASA edited the 425 million high-resolution images captured with its SDO by choosing a photo taken every hour from the satellite.
NASA video condenses the past decade into a 61-minute video, with each second representing approximately one day.
SDO takes a picture of the sun every 0.75 seconds and so far has accumulated 20,000,000 gigabytes of data about the star at the center of the solar system. Take pictures at 10 different wavelengths of light.
The time lapse shows the sun’s outermost atmospheric layer, the corona. It was compiled using images taken at an extreme ultraviolet wavelength of 17.1 nanometers.
Although SDO has focused directly on the sun for the past decade, the video has some dark frames caused by Earth or the moon passing between the satellite and the sun.
The video also has a dark spot when there was a week-long problem with the camera in 2016. At some points in the video, the sun moves out of the center, this is because SDO calibrates its instruments.
The SDO launched on February 11, 2010 and is part of NASA’s Living With a Star program, which aims to understand the influence of the sun on Earth.
NASA is planning a mission to the moon by 2024. The space organization recently named Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and Alabama-based Dynetics as the three teams that will develop vehicles for the mission.
Project credits:
Main producer: Scott Wiessinger (USRA)
Main data viewer: Tom Bridgman (GST)
Chief Scientific Writer: Mara Johnson-Groh (Wyle’s Information Systems)
Support project: Robert C. Garner (USRA)
