NASA takes some awesome pictures. In the last few weeks, the agency has treated Earthlings to images from the icy moon Enceladus, captured by the Saturn-orbiting Cassini probe, and increasingly detailed views of Charon as seen by intrepid New Horizons. But in terms of sheer beauty, these most recent images put those icy rocks all to shame—and NASA didn't even have to leave Earth's orbit to get them.
The Solar Dynamics Observatory is a semi-autonomous spacecraft suspended about 22,000 miles above Earth in an inclined geosynchronous orbit. The observatory keeps its eyes on the sun nearly constantly—it captures an image more than once every second. In this case, the images are a solar storm—the star acts up, erupting into coronal mass ejections and solar flares. Once in a while, those emissions will make it all the way to Earth, leading to the northern lights (neat!) or disrupted GPS satellites, or even delayed airplane travel. Part of the observatory's mission is to monitor and understand that potentially dangerous solar activity.
On October 27, a pair of active regions rotated into the observatory's view. By viewing the sun in extreme ultraviolet light, the satellite's instruments were able to capture magnetic field lines blooming and connecting the two explosive areas. Those emissions didn't pose any threat, but the SDO is on notice. One day, the observatory just might record the solar storm that leads to its own demise.
