Off topic, but interesting: NASA recently shared this video, A Decade Of Sun, that captures a 10-year time-lapse of the sun, created with images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, and paired with an ambient electronic music soundtrack by synthesist Lars Leonhard.

The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has now been watching the Sun non-stop for over a full decade. From its orbit in space around the Earth, SDO has gathered 425 million high-resolution images of the Sun, amassing 20 million gigabytes of data over the past 10 years. This information has enabled countless new discoveries about the workings of our closest star and how it influences the solar system.

The SDO captures an image of the Sun every 0.75 seconds. The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument alone captures images every 12 seconds at 10 different wavelengths of light. This 10-year time lapse showcases photos taken at a wavelength of 17.1 nanometers, which is an extreme ultraviolet wavelength that shows the Sun’s outermost atmospheric layer — the corona. 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.

Some noteworthy events appear briefly in this time lapse:

• 6:20 June 7, 2011– A massive prominence eruption explodes from the lower right of the Sun.
• 12:24 June 5, 2012– The transit of Venus across the face of the Sun. Won’t happen again until 2117.
• 13:06 July 19, 2012– A complex loop of magnetic fields and plasma forms and lasts for hours.
• 13:50 Aug. 31, 2012– The most iconic eruption of this solar cycle bursts from the lower left of the Sun.
• 20:25 Sept. 29, 2013– A prominence eruption forms a long ‘canyon’ that is then covered with loops of plasma.
• 26:39 Oct. 8, 2014– Active regions on the Sun resemble a jack o’ lantern just in time for Halloween.
• 36:18 May 9, 2016– Mercury transits across the face of the Sun. Smaller and more distant than Venus it is hard to spot.
• 43:20 July 5, 2017– A large sunspot group spends two weeks crossing the face of the Sun.
• 44:20 Sept. 6, 2017– The most powerful sequence of flares during this solar cycle crackle for several days, peaking at X9.3.
• 57:38 Nov. 11, 2019– Mercury transits the Sun once more for SDO. The next transit won’t be until 2032.

The soundtrack, titled Solar Observer, was composed German composer Lars Leonhard , who has been working with NASA for several years. An earlier NASA video paired his music with 4k sun footage:

More information is available at the NASA site.