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The Sun, right now
Near-real-time views of the Sun from NASA's SDO/AIA, radially normalized with my RHE method to pull the faint corona into view. Tap any image for a full-size still or a 48-hour timelapse. More about these images ↓
48 hours, one channel at a time
Drag the slider to move through the last two days. Pick another channel and the same moment stays on screen.
About these images
These images were taken recently (see the capture time above) by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a NASA mission launched in 2010. Each color represents the intensity recorded at one particular wavelength of ultraviolet light. Those wavelengths were chosen because they correspond to atomic ions known to exist at a range of temperatures, so these images let us read off the temperature of the solar atmosphere. Find out more about SDO on Wikipedia.
The images have been radially normalized using Radial Histogram Equalization (RHE), my method (Gilly and Cranmer 2025, Solar Physics), which now ships in sunpy's sunkit-image, to pull the faint corona into the same dynamic range as the bright disk. The result is a visualization, not a calibrated radiance. The unprocessed images can be seen at The Sun Today. Like one enough to hang it on a wall? Fine-art prints live in the My Heliogram store.
A note on what you're seeing: each still is the median of several consecutive exposures, which removes cosmic-ray hits and speckle for a cleaner image. Each timelapse video is the most recent 48 hours, three frames per hour. The Rainbow tile is a false-color composite of several channels; the Temperature map is a differential-emission-measure reconstruction whose “T-scan” video sweeps through temperature rather than time.
Imagery courtesy of NASA/SDO and the AIA science team. Each card has an About button that says which ions and temperatures a channel shows, with a button to copy the citation; all twelve are on one printable page.