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Watch Five Years of Solar Eruptions in Unprecedented Detail

To celebrate its anniversary, NASA releases the Solar Dynamics Observatory’s greatest hits.
​The Sun being insane. Image: NASA Goddard/YouTube

Five years ago today, the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) was launched into orbit from Cape Canaveral, becoming the flagship mission of NASA's Living With a Star program.

As the program name suggests, SDO is the first of a series of missions designed to analyze the Sun in unrivaled detail, and to better understand its relationship with our planet. Since its launch, the Observatory has delivered on that objective by taking a picture of the Earth-facing side of the Sun at a rate of almost one frame per second, producing mesmerizing images and timelapses of solar activity.

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To celebrate this half-decade milestone, NASA has released two videos showing off the SDO's high resolution imagery. The first is a timelapse of the Sun's activity over the last five years, in which one frame represents an eight hour period. The Sun's color morphs a few times over the course of the three minute video, demonstrating the variety of light wavelengths in which the Observatory captures our star.

SDO's five year timelapse of the Sun. Image: NASA Goddard/YouTube

The second video is less all-encompassing, but much more bombastic. Call it the Sun's Greatest Hits collection; the highlight reel of the most visually impressive events on the solar surface.

The set list includes surreal images of coronal ejections, which occur when the Sun belches out elegant ribbon-like tendrils of stellar material, sculpted by the intense gravity and magnetism of the star. Around the 3:56 timestamp, it actually looks like the Sun becomes a fantastical portal to another world for a hot minute—and that's without even getting into the epic, Gustav-Holst-style music NASA selected. Upshot: it's worth a look.

SDO highlights. Credit: NASA Goddard/YouTube

Not only has the mission been a success in providing an unprecedented glimpse into our star, the data it has collected has been used in over 2,000 research papers so far. That averages out to a little over one paper a day, which is an impressively steady clip.

To that point, though the Observatory's primary mission will be completed this spring, it is expected to continue operating for another five years, hopefully producing much more research to come.

"This mission has touched us on many levels; it evokes a sense of wonder when we see these beautiful images," said SDO program scientist Lika Guhathakurta in a NASA statement.

"It stokes our curiosity and it connects us personally to the deepest mysteries," she said, "from the warmth we feel on our skin when we walk outside on a sunny day to the distant reaches of the cosmos."