There’s not much to say about this one-minute highlight reel of
imagery captured by NASA’s two-year-old Solar Dynamics
Observatory satellite mission except this: Please watch it and
share it. This description of the visualized data from an
editorial in The Times shortly after the mission began provides
a concise and beautiful summary of what you see: Every 10
seconds, the satellite photographs the solar disk in eight
different wavelengths, and what emerges…is both stirring and
disorienting. The Sun is the most constant object in our lives,
but what we see in these videos is a livid, roiling star,
mottled and seething on every wavelength. It is a thing of
intense, disturbing beauty. Here, thanks to the European Space
Agency, you can see why Russian wildfires have become such an
enormous story in the last couple of weeks. The image above
shows the blossoming of fires around Moscow and the relatively
populous western part of the country in the last 10 days. The
image below shows wildfires through the month of Ju