We have more and better views of the Sun, taking into account how far missions such as NASA’s Parker probe have managed to reach its very atmosphere. Whoever escapes from the Astro King little is the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), and to prove it NASA has created a timelapse that synthesizes 10 years of observations of the Sun In an hour.
A comfortable way to enjoy all the work of the observatory (and especially the team in charge), bearing in mind that in all that time they have accumulated over 20 million gigabytes of data. The images that are compiled in the video that we will show you below allow us to observe how the activity of the sun varies, specifically its corona (the outermost layer of its atmosphere).
Still watching the Sun for a second, literally
The figures surrounding the work behind this timelapse (or rather, its composition) are like the distance that separates us from the sun: vertigo. The SDO has three instruments, each working in the way it needs, capturing one image of the Sun every 0.75 seconds in addition to the work of Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (IAI), which takes images every 12 seconds at ten different wavelengths. To put it very simply, according to what wavelengths the celestial bodies are captured they are seen in one way or another (or they are not seen), as we explain when talking about the color falsification in the photographs of the space we see.
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According to NASA, the ones we see in the video were taken at 17.1 nanometers, which corresponds to the point of the ultraviolet spectrum that allows the corona to be visible. In total, the SDO has captured 425 million high-resolution images of the Sun, of which one every hour has been compiled to do this timelapse 61 minutes.
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It is not necessary to see everything to perceive certain increase and decrease in solar activity, which occurs in eleven-year cycles and at certain times (such as eruptions, transit of planets. etc.). We can notice at times that there are certain flickers, leaving the image black for hundredths of a second (for example, around the minute 2:10 or 14:10), which is because either the Earth or the Moon have eclipsed to the SDO, and we will also see that the Sun is off-centered at some point (due to the calibration of the instruments of the observatory). By the way, on its website you can see where the SDO is in real time.
At the bottom of the video we will see the date of the images, starting since June 2, 2010. There are ten years of measurements and images that are condensed in this piece but that will not end, since the mission still has years of duration. Music, very relaxing and zen, is titled “Solar Observer” and was composed by Lars Leonhard.
If you are curious and / or you like this type of videos, in Xataka we have collected some quite striking about our skies or space, for example in this compilation of 13 videos in 4K and 8K, one of the Perseids that the author himself explained to us in all detail, a curious representation of the creation of the universe or this one about light pollution, unfortunately more realistic and current as we spoke recently as a result of the striking photograph of an astronomer.
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