NASA invited people to “mellow out with lo-fi sounds, and soak up some virtual rays,” and dropped an hourlong video of the suns activity set to electronic artist Lars Leonhards 2022 album “Geometric Shapes.”
The video, captured by the space agency’s Earth-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory, shows activity in the suns outer layer, or corona, from Aug. 12, 2022, to Dec. 22. The SDOs Atmospheric Imaging Assembly captures images in 10 different wavelengths of light; this time lapse shows images taken at an extreme ultraviolet wavelength, which highlights the corona.
Images taken at 108-second intervals were compressed to show the progression of 133 days in just under an hour. The sun rotates about once every 27 days. Bright regions of activity move as the sun rotates, and magnetic fields trap loops of glowing plasma high above them.
NASA says a few dark frames in the video are the result of Earth or the moon eclipsing SDO when they pass between the observatory and the sun, or data errors. Images where the sun appears off-center were taken while SDO was calibrating its instruments.
The SDO has been observing the sun for nearly 13 years, and captures images every 12 seconds. It sends 1.4 terabytes of data back to the ground every day.
