A timelapse of Planet Earth from Electro-L, a geostationary satellite orbiting 40000km above the Earth. The satellite creates a 121 megapixel image every 30 minutes with four visible and infrared light wavelengths. The infrared light appears green in these images, and shows vegetation. The images are the largest whole disk images of our planet, the resolution is 1 kilometer per pixel. The images are "masked" by a circular barrier that blocks out the light of the Sun and other stars. This is to prevent damage to the camera by exposure to direct sunlight. City lights are not visible because they are thousands of times less bright than the reflection of sunlight off the Earth. The images have been interpolated (blended) to create a smooth animation.
Images Copyright NTs OMZ. Videos Copyright James Drake
The archive of full resolution unprocessed images is available on the NTsOMZ website;
You will have to download them via FTP. http://eng.ntsomz.ru/electro/source_images
This video takes SDO images and applies additional processing to enhance the structures visible. While there is no scientific value to this processing, it does result in a beautiful, new way of looking at the sun. The original frames are in the 171 Angstrom wavelength of extreme ultraviolet. This wavelength shows plasma in the solar atmosphere, called the corona, that is around 600,000 Kelvin. The loops represent plasma held in place by magnetic fields. They are concentrated in "active regions" where the magnetic fields are the strongest. These active regions usually appear in visible light as sunspots. The events in this video represent 24 hours of activity on September 25, 2011.
