Science Tips Tips Tricks Technology New Time-lapse From NASA Shows 10 Years of the Sun’s Orbit Compiled of 425 Million Photos

A new time-lapse released by NASA showcases 10 years of images of the Sun — 425 million of them, to be exact. Condensed into a time-lapse, the hour-long video consists of one photo of the Sun every day between June 2nd, 2010 and June 2nd, 2020.

Appropriately titled “A Decade of Sun,” the finished product is a result of images taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) for the past decade.

NASA said:

From its orbit in space around Earth, SDO has gathered 425 million high-resolution images of the Sun, amassing 20 million gigabytes of data over the past 10 years. Compiling one photo every hour, the movie condenses a decade of the Sun into 61 minutes. The video shows the rise and fall in activity that occurs as part of the Sun’s 11-year solar cycle and notable events, like transiting planets and eruptions.

One sensation that you’ll also spot in the clip is significantly dark frames, which NASA explains are caused by the Earth or Moon eclipsing the SDO while they move between the orbiting spacecraft and the Sun. At least, for the most part; there’s one instance where a technical fault took the feed out for a whole week back in 2016 while NASA rushed to fix it.

Experience the time-lapse in its entirety above. The NASA website also offers a more detailed account of the tech used by the SDO to capture the imagery.