Five Glorious Years of Sun Images In a Four-Minute Video 49
An anonymous reader writes: In early 2010, NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory. It carried a number of sensors dedicated to watching and measuring various aspects of the Sun. The SDO's team just celebrated its fifth anniversary by going through a half-decade worth of images, pulling out the most amazing ones, and stitching them into an amazing video (YouTube). It includes enormous flares, sunspots, the transit of Venus, and more.
Sun (Score:2, Funny)
Didn't Oracle buy them and drive them into the ground?
Phenomenal score and video! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Either third link or the video posted below the article summery. Either way, full screen it and the bigger the better.
I'm assuming the flyby views are zooming and natural orbital artifacts but it worked quite well even if I'm wrong.
Re:Phenomenal score and video! (Score:4, Informative)
Here ya go. [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
I'm such a geek... (Score:3, Insightful)
After reading the title, I was trying to figure out what they'd be showing of computer evolution in five years - especially considering it was of Sun computers. At second glance, I realized "Oh, that sun." Sigh...
Anyhow, great video. The description makes it sound like it was a series of still images in video format, but it was very dynamic (maybe series of stills were turned into video or something - I have no idea). Total space pr0n, if you swing that way. I especially enjoyed the shots where the silhouette of what I presume was Mercury passed in front, which gave a fantastic idea of the scale involved. Seems worth five minutes of your life, so give it a watch.
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Anyhow, great video. The description makes it sound like it was a series of still images in video format, but it was very dynamic (maybe series of stills were turned into video or something - I have no idea).
yes, the video is made from a sequence of 4096x4096 stills. I don't know if the artifacts that you can see in some frames are because the detectors were saturated or they are a result of downsampling and the conversion to video.
Speechless (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, I'm simply speechless... (but I'll try anyway)
The Sun is far more beautiful than I imagined... I had some idea from drawings and older pictures that the sun was active, but I had no idea it was THAT active... so much that we don't know...
To quote Agent K:
"1,500 years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was the center of the universe. 500 years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was flat. And 15 minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow."
Re:Speechless (Score:5, Informative)
Except that is completely wrong. To quote an ancient [archive.org] from 300 BC [well over 1500 years ago]: [Text is actually quoted from Archimedes The Sand Reckoner]
And even the medieval theologians knew that the earth was round. To quote St. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica [dhspriory.org]:
That the earth is round was a fact so evident and proven in his time [1247, well over 500 years ago] that it was used as an example of a scientific fact. It is simply false that they thought the earth was flat.
Much of what is said about the ancients is just complete fantasy written by propagandists and not historians.
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I have no doubt that some smart people 1,500 years ago knew these things... and even 500 years ago... but the masses? The people who couldn't read and write and simply existed?
I suspect there was a wide gap between those two groups... heck, there is such a gap today, is there not?
Re:Speechless (Score:5, Interesting)
Columbus was able to convince not only the Queen Isabella, but also the crews and investors who financed the voyage. There was never question of whether India was on the other side of the ocean, but rather of how far away it was. Columbus had a much smaller number than was commonly admitted, which is one reason he got the funds to go [he won the contract, if you will]. Yet the question was on how many degrees of longitude, not on whether the earth was round.
In fact just read most medieval poetry and songs, which were well known to the people. They always refer to the earth as 'this globe' or the sphere. Even a simple sailor knows why the the ship going over the horizon doesn't just get smaller, it also 'descends' over the horizon or disappears. The visible effect of the earth's curvature is visible on the open ocean at just 100 km distance so this is something that even simple workers would know about from observation.
The myth that people thought the earth was flat is just simply 19th century re-invention of history. It has no basis in fact.
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Columbus was probably much smarter than your average lad, otherwise he wouldn't have been able to undertake such a voyage.
You of course might be right in your comments about 19th century re-invention of history, but do you have any sources for that?
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Columbus was probably much smarter than your average lad, otherwise he wouldn't have been able to undertake such a voyage.
He may have been much smarter than your average lad, but at the same time -if you pardon my French- Columbus was an arrogant idiot who went against the common (and correct) knowledge of those days by underestimating the circumference of the Earth by a factor of four. Afterwards he was hailed as the discoverer of America and blabla, but the matter of fact is that he would have drowned if it hadn't been for this random unpredicted piece of land (*) in the middle of the ocean.
(*) Actualy middle-agers made s
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, they stripped him of credit during his lifetime because he ticked off too many people with his poor governing of colonies.
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Or, in this case, movie screenwriters who were just trying to get a point across in three sentences without having to make Tommy Lee-Jones give a lecture on ancient philosophy.
Of course you hit the nail on the head... the poster you're replying to might or might not be correct (I really am not enough of an expert to say), but it misses the point completely...
The point that was being made is simple, yet profound...
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Aristarchus was like the French though: he copied no one, and no one copied him. Greeks used such arguments as: "If the earth orbits the sun, we should see parallax motion of the stars. We don't see parallax motion of the stars. Therefore, the earth does not orbit the sun."
This logic is sound. The problem was with their technology; their instruments were not sensitive enough. Instead of concentrating on how to improve their technology, they spent their time developing epicycles.
So Aristarchus was ignored fo
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That the earth was round, was known from the time of the Ancient Greeks.
In fact, the circumference of the earth was measured by Eratosthenes in the 3rd century BC, with considerable accuracy, using very simple means.
Here is Carl Sagan in Cosmos, on Eratosthenes measurement of the earth's circumference [youtube.com].
You see? (Score:2, Troll)
Daystar bad! The Daystar, it burns us. Best stay indoors and guard our precious.
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Orb brings fire to the sky!
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"Score:2, Troll"
Whoever did that, my hat goes of to you ;)
Electromagnetic force (Score:3)
Those flares and spouts are more shaped by electromagnetic fields than by gravity, right?
Video coverage clarification (Score:4, Informative)
There seems to be some confusion in the introduction and labeling between the 5th year of the probe, and 5 years of video. Here's a fuller compilation:
5-yr time-lapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
Year 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
Year 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
Year 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
Year 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
Year 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
Bonus "rain loop": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
There does seem to be some overlap of coverage in the year numbers, though. Also, year 1 and 2 have bigger eruptions in my opinion.
Magnetic fields sure do freaky stuff to plasma, making it seem to run forward and reverse at the same time.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, the models have current flowing one way and charge the other, so they get kind of freaky. Then the professor makes a mistake, changes a sign, or just waves hands. In the labs, the measurements are wrong but 'within tolerance', and really unpredicted results are not mentioned, censored, self-censored.
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Maybe the weirdness of drugs and the sun would cancel each other out and it would look normal.
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matchbox (Score:1)
Wow.
But they should have added a matchbox in the video, so that one can get a sense of scale...
This might have been edited listening to Driftwood (Score:2)
Praise it! (Score:1)
Oh, hello there. I will stay behind, to gaze at the sun.
The sun is a wondrous body. Like a magnificent father!
If only I could be so grossly incandescent!