10 Years Sun Time Lapse
|I want to present my version of the NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory video A Decade of Sun – 10 years sun time lapse. It’s a timelapse 6x with most of the flickering or missing frames removed. Also, the colors, of course, edited to make the Sun more vibrant and appealing to watch. Sun itself is just a bright white spot, but in these colors, it looks more beautiful, in my opinion.
As of June 2020, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory — SDO has been watching the Sun non-stop for over a full decade. From its orbit in space around the Earth, SDO has gathered 425 million high-resolution images of the Sun, amassing 20 million gigabytes of data over the past ten years. This information has enabled countless discoveries about our closest star’s workings and how it influences the solar system.
Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO
Scott Wiessinger (USRA): Lead Producer
Tom Bridgman (GST): Lead Data Visualizer
Mara Johnson-Groh (Wyle Information Systems): Lead Science Writer
10 Years Sun Time Lapse – video is public domain, and other supporting visualizations can be downloaded from NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio at https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13641
While SDO has kept an unblinking eye pointed towards the Sun, there have been a few moments it missed. The dark frames in the video caused by Earth or the Moon eclipsing SDO as they pass between the spacecraft and the Sun. A temporary issue caused a more extended blackout in 2016 with the AIA instrument successfully resolved after a week. The images where the Sun is off-center observed when SDO was calibrating its instruments. SDO and other NASA missions will continue to watch our Sun in the years to come, providing further insights about our place in space and information to keep our astronauts and assets safe.
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