NASA has produced an hour-long video summarizing 133 days of Sun activity during the last months of 2022. A 4K video accompanied by relaxing music. The result is fascinating to watch.
It is a relaxing and pleasant experience offered by NASA since January 5, 2023. In a video on YouTube, the American space agency offers to admire the activity of the Sun in an hour-long video, all served by a slightly suspended background music. And for the show to be great, the image is served in ultra high definition (4K).
4K images and video of the Sun are obviously not new to NASA. The agency occasionally offers scenes of solar activity with extreme visual quality, such as in 2015. The following year, it showed a solar flare occurring on the star’s surface. All this is possible thanks to a satellite, the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).
An observatory to spy on the activity of the Sun
He’s still with this space observatory — which launched in February 2010 and is still sticking to the post nearly thirteen years later — since NASA produced this video, which summarizes 133 days of solar activity between August 12 and December 22, 2022. , in an hour .
Contrary to what one might think, the solar dynamics observatory is nowhere near the Sun, despite its object of study. The satellite is in orbit around the Earth, at an altitude of 35,786 kilometers. To capture the Sun’s activity, the machine relies on three instruments: an instrument specialized in extreme ultraviolet light, a helioseismic and magnetic imager, and a set of atmospheric images.
And the SDO is not content to bask in the sun from its best side. Thanks to this observatory, countless new discoveries about how of the Sun, assures NASA, especially on the way it affects the Solar System. In particular, the magnetic field of the star is at the heart of the SDO’s concerns.
NASA explains that its video shows images taken with a wavelength of 17.1 nanometers (this is the infinitesimal gap between two waves), with 108 seconds of distance between two shots (although the SDO is capable of capture an image of the Sun every 0.75 seconds) . In this situation, the video helps highlight the Sun’s outer atmospheric layer, called the corona.
If the video mesmerizes you enough to watch it in its entirety, you should notice very punctual blackouts of the image at times. in question ? Sometimes the Earth or the Moon ended up between the SDO and the Sun, depending on the spatial dynamics of these different bodies and the orbit of the satellite itself. There may also be very short cuts caused by capture errors or a bug in one of the tools.
