A Decade of Sun

For over a complete decade now, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, affectionately known as SDO, has been vigilantly monitoring the Sun without interruption. Positioned in orbit around the Earth, SDO has meticulously accumulated a staggering 425 million high-resolution images of our radiant star, accumulating a vast archive of 20 million gigabytes of data over the past ten years. This invaluable dataset has paved the way for numerous groundbreaking discoveries regarding the Sun's mechanisms and its profound influence on our solar system. Equipped with a trio of instruments, SDO captures a mesmerizing image of the Sun every 0.75 seconds. The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument, for instance, takes snapshots every 12 seconds, spanning across 10 different wavelengths of light. This remarkable 10-year time-lapse presentation showcases images captured at a wavelength of 17.1 nanometers, revealing the Sun's outermost atmospheric layer, known as the corona, in extreme ultraviolet light. Condensing a decade of solar activity into 61 minutes, the video offers a captivating visual journey, unveiling the ebb and flow of solar activity associated with the Sun's 11-year solar cycle, as well as notable occurrences such as planetary transits and eruptions.