The Sun, right now

What each channel shows

Each image on the live Sun page is one wavelength of ultraviolet light from NASA's SDO/AIA. The wavelength picks out the atoms that glow at one range of temperatures, so the channels read as a thermometer for the solar atmosphere. Temperatures are the characteristic log T per channel from the AIA instrument page. A channel with more than one value is multithermal: a bright feature could be either the cool or the hot plasma, and the image alone does not say which.

Shown with RHEF (Gilly & Cranmer 2025): a visualization, not a calibrated radiance. Imagery courtesy of NASA/SDO and the AIA science team.

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