Free Republic

It’s the job of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory to keep an eye on the sun, a job the SDO has presented in a new video showing off three years’ worth of solar activity. “In the three years since it first provided images of the sun in the spring of 2010, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory has had virtually unbroken coverage of the sun’s rise toward solar maximum, the peak of solar activity in its regular 11-year cycle,” NASA said in a release. The observatory captures an image of the sun every 12 seconds and does so on 10 different wave lengths...

The video above was created by stitching together two of those images per day over a three-year period. The images in the video were taken in the extreme ultraviolet range and represent solar material at temperatures of about 600,000 Kelvin. Each image is displayed for two frames. That spinning motion you see is the sun's 25-day rotation, and over the course of the video, you should be able to see solar activity grow as the sun nears the pinnacle of its 11-year solar cycle. At the 00:30 mark and at 2:28 you can spot a partial eclipse of the sun...