An SDO Milestone On 19 January 2015 at 12:49 p.m. EST (17:49 UT), NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) snapped this image of the Sun and hit a milestone. This shot of the Sun is SDO’s 100 millionth image of our local star using the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA). The AIA uses four separate solar telescopes to gather eight images of the Sun across ten different wavelengths every twelve seconds. The AIA is responsible for about half of the 1.5 terabytes of data that SDO sends back to Earth daily. Each and every day, the instrument provides 57,600 detailed images of the Sun, catching the mesmerizing dance of magnetic fields, coronal loops and solar eruptions. In the nearly five years since SDO’s launch, it’s stunning imagery has allowed scientists to study solar activity to better understand coronal heating, solar flares, and the complexity of the Sun’s magnetic fields. The SDO team has selected some of their own favorite images from amongst the 100 million taken thus far, and we’ll be sharing a few of them with you over the course of the next few days. Well done, Little SDO, well done. Bravo! -JF Image credit: NASA/SDO Source
