[imagesource: Adobe Stock]

NASA really has been putting out some very cool content lately, and I’m not just talking about the launch of the SpaceX Dragon, later renamed the Endeavour.

That was pretty spectacular.

Their latest offering to the world takes the form of an incredible timelapse of the sun.

The sun, as I’m sure you know, is a hot ball of glowing gases, that keeps our planet warm enough for living things to thrive.

It also shouldn’t be looked at directly, but thanks to technology, NASA has captured over 87 000 high-resolution images of the sun taken over the past decade from its Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).

Here’s Dezeen with how they used them to create the timelapse in celebration of the Observatory’s 10-year anniversary.

To create the timelapse, NASA edited down the 425 million high-resolution images captured with its SDO by choosing one photo taken every hour from the satellite.

NASA’s video condenses the past decade into a 61-minute-long video, with each second representing approximately one day.

The SDO takes an image of the sun every 0.75 seconds and has so far amassed 20,000,000 gigabytes of data on the star at the centre of the solar system. It takes images in 10 different wavelengths of light.

Behold:

The solar flares at around the 30-minute mark are a little concerning, but it seems to settle down.

The timelapse shows the sun’s outermost atmospheric layer, the corona, and was created using images “taken at an extreme ultraviolet wavelength of 17,1 nanometers”.

Although the SDO has been focused directly at the sun for the past decade, the video has some dark frames caused by the Earth or the moon passing between the satellite and the sun.

The video also has a dark spot when there was a week-long issue with the camera in 2016. At some moments in the video the sun moves off centre, this is due to the SDO calibrating its instruments.

Happy anniversary, SDO.

Keep doing what you’re doing.

[source:dezeen]