At the Optimist Daily, we’re always excited when NASA releases new images of our solar system and beyond. This week, NASA marked the 10th anniversary of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite, which has been photographing the sun from its orbit around the Earth since 2010.
In celebration, NASA edited down the 425 million high-resolution images captured in the past decade by choosing one photo taken every hour from the satellite and turning it into a giant 61-minute-long time lapse.
The SDO takes an image of the sun every 0.75 seconds and has so far amassed 20,000,000 gigabytes of data on the star at the center of the solar system. It takes images in 10 different wavelengths of light. The time-lapse shows the sun’s outermost atmospheric layer, the corona. It was compiled using images taken at an extreme ultraviolet wavelength of 17.1 nanometers.
Although the SDO has been focused directly at the sun for the past decade, the video has some dark frames caused by the Earth or the moon passing between the satellite and the sun.
NASA is currently planning a mission to the moon for 2024. The space organization recently named Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and Alabama-based Dynetics as the three teams that will develop vehicles for the mission.
