The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) decade long mission Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which watched sun from an orbiting satellite has now come up with a breathtaking timelapse video. Compiling one photo every hour, the movie portrays a decade of the Sun in just 60 minutes.
The space agency said that the images were taken at an extreme ultraviolet wavelength of 17.1 nanometers. It has captured the outermost atmospheric layer of the sun, the corona.
According to NASA, the mission has succeeded in collecting as many as 425 million high-resolution images of the Sun. They gathered a total of 20 million gigabytes of data over the past 10 years.
With the help of a triad of instruments, SDO captures an image of the sun every 0.75 seconds. However, NASA says that it has still missed a few major moments.
“The dark frames in the video are caused by Earth or the Moon eclipsing SDO as they pass between the spacecraft and the Sun. A longer blackout in 2016 was caused by a temporary issue with the AIA instrument that was successfully resolved after a week. The images where the Sun is off-center were observed when SDO was calibrating its instruments,” the release read.
The movie shows the rise and fall of the solar cycle and other key events, such as transiting planets and solar eruptions.
Watch the video here:
