Categories: Astronomy

This is What the Sun Looked Like for Every Day in 2020

Have you ever seen the videos of people taking daily selfies of themselves over the course of years or even decades?  Now the sun has started it’s own series of pictures – with 366 complete pictures from the year 2020, captured by the European Space Agency’s Proba-2 satellite.

There are a couple of interesting things to note in the pictures.  The first and most obvious is the fact that the satellite experienced two partial solar eclipses, on June 21st and December 14th.  In the pictures, that phenomena makes the sun look like the Cookie Monster got a hold of it for a day.

Perhaps more interestingly, 2020 marked the start of a new solar activity cycle, which happens about every 11 years.  In the images, you can see the sun gradually growing more active throughout the year.  In November and December, areas of intense activity are visible.  Some of those areas could be responsible for coronal mass ejections or solar flares. 

All of these images were captured on the Sun Watcher using Active Pixel System (SWAP) camera, an instrument that focuses on extreme ultraviolet light. The wavelengths it captures show the Sun’s corona, the hottest part which can reach millions of degrees.

SWAP isn’t only good for taking progression pics. Here’s a sample of some work it did in trying to understand the solar poles.
Credit: ESA / Royal Observatory of Belgium

Proba-2 isn’t the only satellite taking these pictures of the sun though.  It’s successor and technological cousin, Solar Orbiter, has a camera known as the Solar Orbiter Extreme Ultraviolet Imager.  It was just launched in 2020, so it wasn’t able to contribute to this stunning series of images from Proba-2, but it will sure be able to in the near future.

Uncropped title image.
Credit: ESA / Royal Observatory of Belgium

Learn More:
ESA – The Sun in 2020
UT – Great View!  January 4 Solar Eclipse As Seen From Space
UT – Two ESA Satellites Launch Successfully
UT – Satellite Captures Solar Eclipse from Space

Feature Image Credit – 366 images of the sun by the Proba-2 Orbiter. Credit ESA / Royal Observatory of Belgium

Andy Tomaswick

Recent Posts

We Understand Rotating Black Holes Even Less Than We Thought

The theory of black holes has several mathematical oddities. Recent research shows our understanding of…

4 hours ago

Habitable Worlds are Found in Safe Places

When we think of exoplanets that may be able to support life, we hone in…

4 hours ago

New Glenn Booster Moves to Launch Complex 36

Nine years ago, Blue Origin revealed the plans for their New Glenn rocket, a heavy-lift…

5 hours ago

How Many Additional Exoplanets are in Known Systems?

NASA's TESS mission has turned up thousands of exoplanet candidates in almost as many different…

9 hours ago

Hubble and Webb are the Dream Team. Don't Break Them Up

Many people think of the James Webb Space Telescope as a sort of Hubble 2.…

16 hours ago

Scientists Have Figured out why Martian Soil is so Crusty

On November 26th, 2018, NASA's Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport (InSight)…

24 hours ago