A time-lapse of the Sun, have you got some time?

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Making a time-lapse can be a fun activity. You can capture a day beautifully, compressed into perhaps 5, 10 or 15 minutes. It shows clouds drifting past, the light visibly changing, and you can beautifully capture flowers opening and closing.

Making a time-lapse is not that difficult. You only need patience. For the time-lapse NASA recently released, you would need a lot of patience. No fewer than 425 million photos, taken since 2010 by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), have been combined into a single time-lapse.

By compressing each day into a single second, a time-lapse 61 minutes long was created. So you need some patience, and perseverance, to watch this video in its entirety. What you see is most of the 11-year solar cycle, planets passing by and solar flares.

There are a few dark frames in the footage, caused by solar eclipses, and a dark period caused by technical failures. But apart from these interruptions, you can enjoy an hour of ten years of sunshine.

A few fun and interesting facts at a glance

• The photos were taken between 2 June 2010 and 2 June 2020
• 1 photo was taken per hour
• In total, 425 million high-resolution photos were taken
• Every second in the time-lapse represents 1 day
• It is 20 million gigabytes of data
• The photos were taken in extreme ultraviolet light (17.1 nanometre wavelength)
• Regular calibration of the SDO satellite sometimes makes the Sun jump from the centre

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