In a amazing hour-extended online video, NASA’s sunlight-pointing semi-autonomous spacecraft, the Photo voltaic Dynamics Observatory, has place jointly a time-lapse of its 10 many years of observing the Sun.
Around the earlier 10 many years, the spacecraft has collected 425 million high-resolution photos of the Sunshine, amassing 20 million gigabytes of facts, NASA stated.
This 10-year time-lapse showcases photographs taken at a wavelength of 17.1 nanometers, which is an intense ultraviolet wavelength that shows the Sun’s outermost atmospheric layer — the corona.
Compiling 1 picture each hour, the movie condenses a ten years of the Sunlight into 61 minutes.
The video clip exhibits the increase and tumble in activity that occurs as section of the Sun’s 11-calendar year photo voltaic cycle and noteworthy events, like transiting planets and eruptions.
The video clip has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people today on YouTube, Twitter and other social media platforms.
The data that SDO has gathered in excess of the earlier 10 a long time has enabled several new discoveries about the workings of the Sunshine and how it influences the solar technique.
With a triad of instruments, SDO captures an graphic of the Sunlight each .75 seconds.
The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument alone captures visuals every single 12 seconds at 10 unique wavelengths of light-weight.
When SDO has saved an unblinking eye pointed in the direction of the Sunshine, there have been a several times it skipped, NASA reported.
The darkish frames in the video clip are prompted by Earth or the Moon eclipsing SDO as they move between the spacecraft and the Sunshine.
A for a longer time blackout in 2016 was brought on by a temporary issue with the AIA instrument that was successfully settled soon after a week.
The photos where the Sun is off-middle were being noticed when SDO was calibrating its devices.
SDO was released on February 11, 2010.
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