Looking Sideways from the Parker Solar Probe
Video Credit:
NASA,
JHUAPL,
Naval Research Lab,
Parker Solar Probe;
Processing: Avi Solomon; h/t:
Richard Petarius III;
What's happening near the Sun?
To help find out, NASA
launched the robotic
Parker Solar Probe (PSP) to
investigate
regions closer to the Sun than ever before.
The PSP's looping
orbit
brings it nearer to the Sun
each time around -- every few months.
The featured time-lapse video
shows the view looking sideways from
behind PSP's Sun shield during its 16th approach to the Sun last year --
from well within the orbit of
Mercury.
The PSP's Wide Field Imager for Solar Probe
(WISPR)
cameras took the images over eleven days,
but they are digitally compressed here into about one minute video.
The waving of the
solar corona is visible, as is a
coronal mass ejection,
with stars, planets, and even the central band of our
Milky Way Galaxy streaming by in the background as the
PSP orbits the Sun.
PSP has found the solar neighborhood to be
surprisingly complex and to include
switchbacks --
times when the
Sun's magnetic field briefly reverses itself.