Video of the Day: 10 Years of Observing the Sun in One Hour

Plus an explanation of why it looks dimmer now than it did 10 years ago.

In June 2020, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) program turned 10 years old. During this time, scientists have received more than 425 million high-resolution photographs of our star, the total amount of data obtained has exceeded 20 million gigabytes. This has allowed scientists to make many discoveries in recent years.

Using a variety of tools and cameras, SDO creates new images of the Sun every 0.75 seconds. You probably won't want to see all these photos ever, but for the 10th anniversary of the program, NASA scientists prepared a time-lapse, each frame of which was taken an hour apart. So a whole decade of observations fit into a 61-minute video.

For those who do not want to spend so much time watching, there is a version cut down to a minute - but in a worse quality and without musical accompaniment.

10 years.
20 million gigabytes of data.
425 million hi-res images of the Sun.

A new time-lapse video marks a decade of operations for our

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@NASASun Solar Dynamics Observatory. Watch: https://t.co/jRRWuBfcLbpic.twitter.com/SPBDWfJwzP

- NASA (@NASA) June 24, 2020

In comments to the Twitter post, many users are concerned about the apparent decrease in solar flares - especially in the accelerated video. NASA representatives did not comment on this, but other users mentioned about the 11-year cycle of solar activity, during which there are at least its minimum and maximum. In the current 24th cycle, the maximum was in 2014, so it is not surprising that in 2019-2020 activity again tends to a minimum.