The Goddard Space Flight Center of the POT published a spectacular one-hour video made with the time-lapse technique that shows 133 days of the Sun’s activity.
According to the report published on the website of gizmodoin the sequence you can appreciate chaos and beauty at the same time, with the formation of large loops of plasma over the star.
For those who don’t know it, the time-lapse technique consists of everything that has been captured moving very quickly, so even if it lasts an hour, the video shows more than 100 days of the star’s life.
Scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center were assisted by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a spacecraft launched in 2010 as part of the US space agency’s Living With a Star (LWS) program, which ended in 2015 but the SDO will remain active until 2030.
How did you achieve the time-lapse?
The report adds that the images were captured 108 seconds apart in the extreme ultraviolet wavelength with SDO’s Extreme Ultraviolet Variability (EVE) Experiment, which captures approximately 70,000 images daily, totaling up to 1.5TB of data.
In addition, the spacecraft is in a geosynchronous orbit 22,000 km above Earth and the Sun rotates every 27 days, creating an ever-changing view of the star’s surface.
“This video narrates Solar activity from August 12 to December 22, 2022as captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)”, NASA wrote in the description of the video.
“Since its orbit in space around Earth, SDO has constantly photographed the Sun. in 4K x 4K resolution for almost 13 years. This information has enabled countless new discoveries about the workings of our nearest star and how it influences the solar system.”.
