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Tag: SDO

  • NASA Video Shows Sun’s Rise in Activity

    NASA Video Shows Sun’s Rise in Activity

    The sun. We see it nearly every day, and yet most of us spend a considerable amount of time trying to keep it out of our eyes or off our skin.

    NASA, on the other hand, has been staring straight into the sun for years now. The agency launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in 2010 to capture images of the sun, which it does every 12 seconds in 10 different wavelengths. Scientists are using the SDO to learn more about the sun and to improve predictions for solar flares and coronal mass ejections, which can affect satellites orbiting Earth.

    In the three years since its launch, the SDO has observed the sun as it ramps up to “solar maximum,” which is the peak of the star’s 11-year solar activity cycle. To demonstrate this increase in the sun’s activity, NASA this week released a video that puts together many of the images taken by the SDO. The time-lapsed video shows two images of the sun per day for three years. It also has some nice background music (“A Lady’s Errand of Love” by Martin Lass).

  • NASA Shows Off Its 4K Sun Images

    NASA Shows Off Its 4K Sun Images

    There’s a cost associated with being an early adopter, and it’s not just the higher prices. New media formats consistently outpace the rate at which content creators can adapt to the new formats. As a result, early adopters pay exorbitant sums for tech to display boring demo footage for months before ESPN finally updates its broadcast technology, which happens coincide with the release of the second, better generation of devices.

    With HDTV, customers were often left watching nature footage and landscapes. With the 4K TV revolution just starting, TV manufacturers are going to need some content that shows customers what they’re missing with their crappy 1080p displays. Luckily, NASA has a suggestion.

    Astronomers at NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) for some time have been using an Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) and Helioseismic Magnetic Imager (HMI) to take ultra high-definition images twice as large as anything seen on the displays at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Every second.

    As of last month, the SDO had taken 100 million images. NASA bragged that if they were watched at 30 frame sper second there would be enough footage to watch eight hours a day for nearly four months. That’s a lot of staring at the sun.

    It’s unclear whether NASA is actually promising 4K content for showrooms or whether the agency just used the excuse of CES to show off its SDO photos. Either way, more SDO images and video, mostly of solar eruptions and flares, can be found on NASA’s SDO website.

    (Image courtesy NASA/GSFC/SDO)

  • Solar Eruption Rang in the New Year, Shows NASA Video

    While people across the world were celebrating or preparing to celebrate the arrival of the year 2013, the sun was putting on a New Year’s show of its own.

    On December 31, a massive solar eruption twisted up from the surface of the sun, propelled by swirling magnetic forces. The eruption extended around 160,000 miles out from the surface of the sun, or 20 times the diameter of the Earth. It lasted from 10:20 am to 2:20 pm EST.

    Luckily for fans of space images, NASA‘s Solar Dynamic Observatory was not on holiday. The observatory caught the event in ultraviolet light. The video below shows the event from its explosive beginning to its serene finale, when wisps of plasma “gently” fell back to the sun’s surface. Every image in the video is 36 seconds apart.

    (Image and video courtesy NASA/SDO/Steele Hill)

  • Massive Solar Tornado Spotted on the Sun

    Massive Solar Tornado Spotted on the Sun

    NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) satellite has captured images and video of a tornado on the sun several times as large as the Earth.

    Last September the SDO satellite filmed this twirling mass of superheated gas, which ranges in temperature from 50,000 to 2,000,000 Kelvin, over the course of three hours. The tornado was 200,000 kilometers in height, which is a little more than half the distance between the Earth and the moon. It spun at nearly 300,000 kilometers per hour.

    Solar tornados are not created by wind, though – the sun’s magnetic fields twist these formations up from its surface. They often occur at the root of huge coronal mass ejections, which can damage satellites and knock out electricity grids when ejected in the direction of Earth.

    “This unique and spectacular tornado must play a role in triggering global solar storms,” said Dr. Huw Morgan, co-discoverer of solar tornadoes.

    This particular tornado was presented in Manchester, England at the National Astronomy Meeting on Thursday. Though other solar tornadoes have been observed, this one was the first one caught on film.

    “This is perhaps the first time that such a huge solar tornado [has been] filmed by an imager. Previously much smaller solar tornadoes were found my SOHO satellite. But they were not filmed,” says Dr. Xing Li

    Subsequent tornadoes were filmed in February, as can be seen in this video: