SPACE - See Three Years Of Solar Dynamics Compressed Into Three Minutes [VIDEO]

The sun by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (image credit: NASA)

Today, NASA released onto the WWW what is sure to be one of its most popular videos of all time...Three years worth of time-lapsed video of our sun capture by the Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO)...

How it was made and what to look for...

Every 12 seconds, SDO captures an image of our sun at 10 different wavelengths of light (including Infrared wave lengths which we normally never see) thanks to its Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA).

What you see in this video (reposted here from Youtube user Dante Chazy's video channel, originally uploaded by NASAexplorer) is three years of activity compiled from two images per day. The images used here are those taken in the extreme ultra violet range. At this wavelength (171 Angstroms) one can discern the sun's 25-day rotation cycle and also an incremental increase in solar activity as the sun leaves its solar minimum phase and enters its solar maximum phase.

You may also detect a subtle increase or decrease in the apparent size of the sun due to the variation in distance between the SDO and the sun over this time period. And of course, you can see sunspots (often in pairs) emerging and major solar events like solar flares and coronal mass ejections.

Other notable events recorded in this video include two partial solar eclipses by the moon, two "roll maneuvers" (by the SDO spacecraft), the largest solar flare of this solar cycle (so far), comet Lovejoy, and the transit of Venus.

In case you need a time reference for these, they are listed below.

00:30;24 Partial eclipse by the moon

00:31;16 Roll maneuver

01:11;02 August 9, 2011 X6.9 Flare, currently the largest of this solar cycle

01:28;07 Comet Lovejoy, December 15, 2011

01:42;29 Roll Maneuver

01:51;07 Transit of Venus, June 5, 2012

02:28;13 Partial eclipse by the moon"

One final note: the last minute of video shows the sun in four different wavelengths at once, and ends with an image of the SDO in orbit...And now...the SDO VIDEO...

See Three Years Of Solar Dynamics Compressed Into Three Minutes [VIDEO] was originally posted on: PlanetSave. To read more from Planetsave, join thousands of others and subscribe to our free RSS feed, follow us on Facebook (also free), follow us on Twitter, or just visit our homepage.

http://planetsave.com/2013/04/24/see-three-years-of-solar-dynamics-com