NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has been watching the sun for three years now and released a stunning video of the footage condensed into just three minutes.
The timelapse video reveals solar flares and coronal mass ejections caught in the act in unprecedented detail. The images from the SDO also show space weather that can send radiation and solar material toward Earth and interfere with satellites in space.
SDO's Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) captures a shot of the sun every 12 seconds in 10 different wavelengths. Every shot has been taken in 10 wavelengths and each wavelength depicts the sun in a different way. From the captured images, four of them will be featured in the second half of the video.
NASA said these images provide scientists with a consistent stream of data to analyze and resolve various mysteries related to sun. If seen through the image, it can be witnessed that the sun shrinks and grows very faintly over the course of the video. This is because the images have been taken from spacecraft.
The images shown here are based on a wavelength of 171 Angstroms, which is in the extreme ultraviolet range and shows solar material at around 600,000 Kelvin.
The video below shows those three years of the sun at a pace of two images per day:
