NASA’s Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) mission released a spiffy video of the Moon transiting the Sun. I find myself oddly captivated by the video, watching it over and over…

It reminds me of the good ol’ days of the SGI Reality Centers, when managing high-resolution data was a bigger deal than it is today. They would loop TRACE imagery of the Sun. I think I could watch it for hours, although I never really had the chance. And when we tested audiences for our Cosmic Collisions space show, it seemed I wasn’t alone, since people responded most positively to the solar images.

At the same time, I kind of dislike the color. It seems garish, even though I know it’s done in the standard mappping style. Heck, the web page even tells us: “The Sun as it appears in these the images and each frame of the movie is a composite of nearly simultaneous images in four different wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light that were separated into color channels and then recombined with some level of transparency for each.” Except for the “some level of transparency” bit, that’s a fairly lucid explanation.

More lucid than this post, I suppose. But you should watch the movie!