Full Map of the Sun's Surface
This movie shows the evolution of the Sun's entire surface as seen in extreme ultraviolet light (304 angstroms) for the time period Jan 1 - Sep 27, 2012. The movie was made by combining nearly simultaneous view of the Sun from three spacecraft: STEREO AHEAD and BEHIND (seeing the Sun's far side) and the Solar Dynamic Observer (seeing the near side). This EUV light comes primarily from the solar chromosphere. The bright patches are active regions. Many dark prominence eruptions can also be seen.
The data is plotted in Carrington coordinates which are "fixed" to the surface of the Sun. In this coordinate system, the active regions tend to stay at the same location. However, the Sun's rotation rate actually changes with latitude and this can be seen in the movie.
An animated 360 degree map of the sun
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Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA JPL
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Technical support
Release date
This page was originally published on Tuesday, October 22, 2013.
This page was last updated on Tuesday, November 14, 2023 at 12:24 AM EST.
Datasets used in this visualization
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304 Angstroms [STEREO: Extreme UltraViolet Imager (EUVI)]
ID: 624This dataset can be found at: https://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov
See all pages that use this dataset -
AIA 304 (304 Filter) [SDO: AIA]
ID: 677This dataset can be found at: http://jsoc.stanford.edu/
See all pages that use this dataset
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.