The Sun, right now

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 & Cranmer, in prep), which now ships in sunpy's sunkit-image — to pull the faint corona into the same dynamic range as the bright disk. 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 Solar Archive store.

A note on what you're seeing: each still is the median of the three most recent exposures (taken a few minutes apart), 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.