We see it every day but we don’t even look at it. We can’t, or we will be struck blind, according to our second grade teachers. It is so awe-inspiring that every single ancient religion had a god for it. From Apollo to Ra, we showed our appreciation for the ultimate source of the energy of life on this planet. But it always just looked like a yellow ball in the sky. You can feel its heat and see its light, but it doesn’t really feel alive. Well now, for the first time in human history, we have up close videos of it. Amazing videos. Fall-out-of-your-chair unbelievable videos.

Launched on February 11, 2010, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory is one of the most amazing satellites ever created. Its basic goal is to study every possible bit of information the sun puts out in its expected operational lifetime of five years.

Every day SDO generates 1.5 terabytes of information on its ten cameras which it beams back to two dedicated radio telescopes in New Mexico. That works out to 150 million bits of data every single second, the equivalent of 380 full-length Hollywood movies. Why is there so much information coming back? Instead of studying pieces of the sun, SDO has the capability to capture the entire orb at full resolution at all times. And it measures many different wavelengths, layers, and temperatures all at once. The equipment is that good. What follows are some videos that were released by NASA last week that knocked me off my feet. If they don’t knock you off your feet too, remember that what you are looking at is our star, the bright thing you see in the sky every single day. The continuous nuclear bomb going off that’s 330 thousand times the size of our tiny little Earth and eight minutes away, light-wise. And these are videos. It’s alive. Enjoy.

This video shows an incredible eruption on the surface of the sun. It’s narrowly focused on an extreme ultraviolet wavelength. The temperature of the material in this eruption is around fifty thousand degrees Kelvin. It is the same few frames played over and over again, and the zoom out at the end gives you a hint of the capability of SDO.

Here is a great video explaining the function and purpose of one of the three experiments on board the SDO called the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, or AIA.

This video combines telescopes from the AIA and another experiment called the Helioseismic and Magnetic imager. It shows four layers of the sun’s magnetic field and a subsequent flare. The river of darkness (the blastwave from the eruption) that starts flowing at the 1:00 mark at the Iron XII wavelength sends shivers down my spine. Keep in mind that several Earths could sit comfortably side-by-side just in the eruption in this video.

Here is a video combining multiple layers of the eruption from the previous video. It also gives you a sense of scale of the eruption in terms of the sun itself.

There’s just something about seeing the sun in motion that makes worlds of difference. This is only a few of the first round of videos released by NASA, many more are sure to come. To watch the other videos released, or to keep tabs on future videos, I encourage you to check out the SDO YouTube page NASA maintains. I hope you are entranced by the power and beauty in nature in the same way I was watching these videos.

– Alex Shofner

For those of you interested in the technical aspects, read this paragraph. If you aren’t, skip it. According to the SDO website: “SDO has 10 CCDs, 8 inside the science instruments and 2 in the star trackers. The science CCDs operate at very low temperatures. The EVE CCDs are 2Kx2K pixels and operate at -100 C. The HMI and AIA CCDs are 4Kx4K and operate at about -70 C. HMI has 2 high-grade visible light CCDs while AIA and EVE treated their CCDs to make them more suitable for detecting extreme ultraviolet light. To cool a CCD we hook it to a radiator panel and keep the Sun off the panel. Thermal radiation leaving the panel is enough to send into space the small amount of heat generated by operating the CCD.”