Powerful NASA video shows solar flare up close
Just one week after revealing that our holiday lights are visible from space, NASA’s Goddard Media Studios have released a breathtaking video of a recent solar flare.
The flare, which is basically just the sun emitting a huge burst of radiation, took place last Friday, reaching its peak just before 7:30 p.m. EST. And while this particular solar flare was pretty powerful, classified as an X1.8 (the X signifying the highest class of intensity, with the number as a more specific descriptor of its strength), people on Earth felt no impact from it. In fact, we couldn’t even see it.
That’s why the scientists at NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, who captured the images of the flare, asked Goddard Media Studios producer Genna Duberstein to use different colors to illustrate the variety of light being emitted from the sun.
“There are tons of light [rays coming] from the sun. Not all of them get down to Earth, and not all of them our eyes can see,” Duberstein told Yahoo News. “Extreme ultraviolet, for example, is invisible to our eyes. So the scientists and engineers assigned color coding to the visible light so they can talk about them.”
The result is a captivating swirl of color and light that brings the invisible majesty of the sun’s rays down to Earth.
Friday’s solar flare wasn’t the only astronomical phenomenon released on video this week. During a six-month stint aboard the International Space Station, Alexander Gerst, an astronaut with the European Space Agency, spent a lot of time looking down at Earth from different angles and locations and at different times of day. Gerst strung together 12,500 images of the planet captured during that mission into one, six-minute timelapse video that’s out of this world.
