SDO: The Solar Dynamics Observatory launched on 2-11-2010 ... to study solar variability ... its impacts on Earth ... by studying the solar atmosphere in many wavelengths simultaneously ... how the Sun's magnetic field is generated and structured ... how it forms solar wind, energetic particles, and variations in the solar irradiance ... how Space Weather comes from that activity. This recurring diary highlights that solar activity.
Citizen Scientists use the images from SDO in their own projects. One such project is on Youtube channel GeeMackVideo. The SDO image data is publicly available soon after being received by the science teams. Images are provided at a rate of about one per channel every 15 minutes. The following video is of recent solar activity from the GeeMackVideo series. |
Just after the video starts, click the icons like the ones below these colored arrows for HD and full screen.
The small blue Earth icon in the upper right is for scale. |
|
The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) generates an enormous amount of data as it monitors the Sun's activity. It is a sun-pointing spacecraft making nearly continuous observations with an almost constant data downlink of 130 Megabits per second. The spacecraft is 4.5 m x 2 m with a mass of 3100 kg. One of the instruments is the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA). This link is to a section of a previous diary in a SciTech series by palantir. The series is linked at the end of this diary. The AIA link provides detailed specifications of this instrument and examples of the data obtained. |
The process and how long it takes GeeMack to make his videos...
It takes around a half hour to download the data for a 12 hour sequence to make a 40 second video. Each frame comes in as a 1M compressed 4096x4096 grayscale image. I figure out the crop and run those images through as a batch cropping program. That might take another half hour. Then I put them in a video program which adds the color, logo overlays, and music, and tweak the start/finish and final crop. That can be five or ten minutes. Then run the result through a converter to make the MP4 finished product, another 5 minutes. And uploading to YouTube might take another 10. Most of it is automated, so I might have 15 or 20 minutes hands-on time. It's often a couple hours from when I start to when I post the link. But in many cases the most recent frame in the video can be only an hour ago in real time.
The solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CME) can sometimes be directed at the Earth. Such events can greatly affect Earth's Spaceweather. The Spaceweather link provides information on solar winds, x-ray solar flares, sunspots, aurora forecasts, images of interest, and much more. There is also a searchable archive by date in the upper right. |
The subject of SDO has been thoroughly covered before in an excellent and comprehensive diary series by my friend and colleague in SciTech palantir. I urge readers to consult those diaries listed below for a wealth of additional information, science instrumentation, videos, and more. |
Sun er Tuesday Science Videos Solar Dynamics Observatory
Sunday Science Videos 8 Living With A Star
Sunday Science Videos 9 Solar Dynamics Observatory (Finale) |
Links to additional resources |
Citizen Science projects have been around for a long time. One of the first I participated in is Seti@Home and the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.
A more recent and large collection of projects is at Zooniverse. You will find projects covering galaxies, the Moon and Sun, extra-solar planets, star formation, Kuiper Belt icy objects, weather logs from old ships, ancient Greece, and whale communication.
Astronomy Picture of the Day
NASA Image of the Day
NASA/JPL News Video Channel
JPL Solar System Simulator
SOHO Solar and Heliospheric Observatory
Solar and Heliospheric Forecasts |
The Sun's activity is on the increase. It is expected that solar flares and CME will become more frequent. I will monitor the
GeeMackVideo channel and post new videos when interesting activity is happening. That might be as often as each week or two. If you want to see more, visit his channel.
In the interest of full disclosure, the owner of the GeeMackVideo channel is my brother-in-law. Some of the music in the videos is provided by his talented wife.