This was the sun for the SDO on August 13, 2012.
Screenshot of NASA video by Amanda Kooser / CNET
What are you doing this weekend? Respond, “See a video from a NASA time lapse showing a full decade of the sun.” You will not regret.
NASA released a truly epic video on Wednesday that compiles 10 years of views of our star’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Each second represents one day, and it takes more than an hour to travel through time from June 2, 2010 to June 1, 2020.
The SDO spacecraft can safely see the sun and witness its moods, outbursts, and relatively calm stretches. The video celebrates SDO’s decade of observations since its release in 2010.
“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,” NASA said in a statement on Wednesday.
If you see a time when the video goes dark, don’t worry. That happens when Earth or Moon get in the way of SDO’s vision. There was also a technical issue in 2016 that created a brief camera blackout.
Watch for scenic outbursts and eclipse action when you can see a bite of black moving through the sun’s disk. When the star bounces, it is only an artifact of the instrument’s calibration process.
Composer Lars Leonhard’s appropriately spatial music track is called the Solar Observer. The entire video experience is fascinating. This may well be the summer movie event.
