NASA has released a new time lapse titled “A Decade of Sun”, and it is exactly what it seems. Using 425 million images captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) since it began monitoring the sun in 2010, NASA has created a time lapse of the sun where each second represents one day.
The final creation (see above) runs for a full hour, showing the existence of our sun every day between June 2, 2010 and June 2, 2020.
“From its orbit in space around Earth, SDO has collected 425 million high-resolution images of the Sun, accumulating 20 million gigabytes of data in the past 10 years,” explains NASA. By compiling one photo every hour, the film condenses a decade of the Sun into 61 minutes. The video shows the rise and fall of activity that occurs as part of the Sun’s 11-year solar cycle and notable events such as transiting planets and eruptions. “
Interestingly, there are some dark frames in the video. This, NASA explains, is the result of Earth or Moon dwarfing the Solar Dynamics Observatory when they pass between the orbiting spacecraft and the Sun. There is also an “extended” outage in 2016 that was caused by a technical problem It took NASA a week to fix it.
In addition to those relatively short blackouts, what you mentioned above is every day of our sun’s existence for the past 10 years … almost a full 11-year solar cycle.
View the full time lapse above to experience a decade of sunshine for yourself, and for more information on what you’re seeing, head over to the NASA website for a detailed explanation of the onboard imaging technology from SDO .
(via DPReview)
