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To announce the new NASA solar dynamics observatory, they released a brand new video of the sun last week.  It’s amazing, but it’s also large and takes quite a while to load, even with a fast connection.

NASA writes:

April 21, 2010: Warning, the images you are about to see could take your breath away.

At a press conference today in Washington DC, researchers unveiled “First Light” images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, a space telescope designed to study the sun.

“SDO is working beautifully,” reports project scientist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “This is even better than we could have dreamed.”

Launched on February 11th from Cape Canaveral, the observatory has spent the past two months moving into a geosynchronous orbit and activating its instruments. As soon as SDO’s telescope doors opened, the spacecraft began beaming back scenes so beautiful and puzzlingly complex that even seasoned observers were stunned.

For instance, here is one of the first things SDO saw:

“We’ve seen solar prominences before—but never quite like this,” says Alan Title of Lockheed Martin, principal investigator of the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA), the observatory’s main telescope array. “Some of my colleagues say they’ve learned new things about prominences just by watching this one movie.”

SDO is the first mission of NASA’s Living with a Star (LWS) program. The goal of LWS is to understand the sun as a magnetic variable star and to measure its impact on life and society on Earth. Program scientist Lika Guhathakurta of NASA headquarters envisions big things for the new observatory:

“SDO is our ‘Hubble for the sun’,” she says. “It promises to transform solar physics in the same way the Hubble Space Telescope has transformed astronomy and cosmology.”

“No solar telescope has ever come close to the combined spatial, temporal and spectral resolution of SDO,” adds Title. “This is possible because of the combination of 4096 x 4096-pixel CCDs with huge dynamic range and a geosynchronous orbit which allows SDO to observe the sun and communicate with the ground around the clock.”

Read more here.

A complete gallery of SDO’s First Light images and data may be found at http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/Gallery/ SDOFirstLight.html.