Watch: One Year Time-lapse of Sun Showing its Corona Plasma

The NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) space-craft keeps a 24 hour watch on the Sun. A new video shows an entire year’s worth of footage condensed into a few minutes, with each frame representing two hours of recording.
Jonathan Zhou
2/13/2016
Updated:
2/13/2016

The NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spacecraft keeps a 24-hour watch on the Sun. A new video shows an entire year’s worth of footage condensed into a few minutes, with each frame representing two hours of recording.

The SDO’s imaging system captures images of the sun in 10 different wavelengths, but in this video only the images captured on the 171 angstroms level is used because it’s the one that’s most visible, making the Sun’s rotation easier to discern, and it shows solar material that can reach over a million degrees Fahrenheit.

The size of the Sun appears to show slight increases and decreases but that’s because the distance between the SDO and the Sun varies as the former rotates in the Earth’s orbit.

Studying the Sun’s corona ejections is useful for scientists because selective excursions from the Sun can often reach the space around the Earth and beyond, occasionally disrupting outer space technology.

Jonathan Zhou is a tech reporter who has written about drones, artificial intelligence, and space exploration.
Related Topics