A NASA Time-Lapse Video Compressing Five Years of the Sun’s Rotation Into Less Than Three Minutes

NASA‘s heliophysics division recently celebrated the five-year anniversary of the Solar Dynamics Observatory with a time-lapse video that compresses five years of the Sun’s rotation into less than three minutes. The video also features the Sun as seen through a number of different wavelengths and combinations thereof.

The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) celebrates its 5th anniversary since it launched on February 11, 2010. This time-lapse video captures one frame every 8 hours starting when data became available in June 2010 and finishing February 8, 2015. The different colors represent the various wavelengths (sometimes blended, sometimes alone) in which SDO observes the sun.