The sun's beauty has been captured by NASA in 4K Ultra HD, giving space enthusiasts a safe way to examine the fireball. A color was assigned to the sun's various wavelengths, each of which highlights a different temperature. The result is breathtaking.
Set to a dramatic soundtrack, the 30-minute 'Thermonuclear Art' video showcases the sun in “unprecedented detail,” NASA's Goddard Space Center wrote in its description.
The footage was made possible by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which keeps an eye on the sun 24/7 and captures images of the fireball in 10 different wavelengths of invisible ultraviolet light. It snaps a photo every 12 seconds, each of which is eight times the resolution of HD video.
But those wavelengths aren't invisible in the video. Instead, each has been assigned a different color, which highlight different temperatures. The end result is a feast for the eyes, with swirling hues hypnotically traveling across the sun.
Making such a beautiful (and lengthy) video wasn't an easy feat. In fact, it took a team of video technicians about 10 hours to make one minute of footage – meaning that around 300 hours were put into the video.
But the hours were worth it, according to the Goddard Space Center, which says the video “presents the nuclear fire of our life-giving star in intimate detail, offering new perspective into our own relationships with grand forces of the solar system.”
The breathtaking footage comes just weeks after NASA released a 4K video of Jupiter, which revealed previously unknown details about the gas giant.