Video of the sun marks 5th year anniversary of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory

This is just too beautiful not to share. NASA marks the 5-year anniversary of their Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) with this video showing amazingly pulsing mass explosions, solar flares, sunspots, coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and the like. SDO provides 13 full-sun images every 10 seconds, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That’s 2,600 terabytes of data! For more, see the Solar Dynamics Observatory.

February 11, 2015 marks five years in space for NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which provides incredibly detailed images of the whole sun 24 hours a day. Capturing an image more than once per second, SDO has provided an unprecedentedly clear picture of how massive explosions on the sun grow and erupt ever since its launch on Feb. 11, 2010. The imagery is also captivating, allowing one to watch the constant ballet of solar material through the sun’s atmosphere, the corona.

In honor of SDO’s fifth anniversary, NASA has released a video showcasing highlights from the last five years of sun watching. Watch the movie to see giant clouds of solar material hurled out into space, the dance of giant loops hovering in the corona, and huge sunspots growing and shrinking on the sun’s surface.

via GMM: SDO: Year 5 (id 11742).

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