Ten Years of Solar Dynamics Observatory

  • Released Wednesday, June 24, 2020
View full credits

Ten years of SDO AIA 171 angstrom data with day time stamp overlay. Frames are sampled approximately one image every hour.

Here we present a continuous run of data from the AIA instrument 171 angstrom filter aboard Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Compiling one photo every hour, the movie condenses a decade of the Sun (June 2, 2010-June 1, 2020) into an almost 49 minute time lapse, where every second corresponds to 30 hours of SDO data.

There's a number of phenomema observed:

  • Earth eclipses: usually occur in February-March and August-September each year.
  • Lunar transits: We see the lunar disk block out the Sun
  • Instrument repointings for calibration purposes

Naturally this movie includes a number of events that have been explored previously:
Interesting physical features:
  • In October and November 2014, a large helmet streamer is visible extremely high above the solar limb. You can still observe it above the solar limb as it moves across the far-side of the Sun.

At various times the AIA instrument failed to collect data resulting in some large data gaps appearing in this visualization as black frames.
  • April 1, 2015: about 8 hours
  • May 13, 2015: about 6 hours
  • December 26, 2015: about 27 hours
  • August 2, 2016: about 8 days
  • April 30, 2017: about a day
  • June 28, 2018: about 18 hours

Ten years of SDO AIA 171 angstrom data, 4Kx4K with color table. Frames are sampled approximately one image every hour.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Missions

This page is related to the following missions:

Datasets used

Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.

This page was originally published on Wednesday, June 24, 2020.
This page was last updated on Monday, January 6, 2025 at 12:15 AM EST.