133 Days on the ☀️

This video chronicles solar activity from Aug. 12 to Dec. 22,
2022, as captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory
(SDO). From its orbit in space around Earth, SDO has steadily
imaged the Sun in 4K x 4K resolution for nearly 13 years. This
information has enabled countless new discoveries about the
workings of our closest star and how it influences the solarsystem.
With a triad of instruments, SDO captures an image of the Sun
every 0.75 seconds. The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA)
instrument alone captures images every 12 seconds at 10
different wavelengths of light. This 133-day time lapse
showcases photos taken at a wavelength of 17.1 nanometers,
which is an extreme-ultraviolet wavelength that shows the
Sun's outermost atmospheric layer: the corona. Compiling
images taken 108 seconds apart, the movie condenses 133
days, or about four months, of solar observations into 59
minutes. The video shows bright active regions passing across
the face of the Sun as it rotates. The Sun rotates
approximately once every 27 days. The loops extending above
the bright regions are magnetic fields that have trapped hot,
glowing plasma. These bright regions are also the source of
solar flares, which appear as bright flashes as magnetic fields
snap together in a process called magnetic reconnection.
While SDO has kept an unblinking eye pointed toward the Sun,
there have been a few moments it missed. Some of the dark
frames in the video are caused by Earth or the Moon eclipsing
SDO as they pass between the spacecraft and the Sun. Other
blackouts are caused by instrumentation being down or data
errors. SDO transmits 1.4 terabytes of data to the ground
every day. The images where the Sun is off-center were
observed when SDO was calibrating its instruments.