30 years of SOHO imaging the Sun (unannotated)

The ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has been observing the Sun for 30 years. In that time, SOHO has observed nearly three of the Sun’s 11-year solar cycles, throughout which solar activity waxes and wanes.  

This montage of 30 images captured by the spacecraft’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope provides a snapshot of the changing face of our Sun. The brightest images occur around the time of solar maximum, when the Sun’s magnetic field is twisting and reshaping itself. Thanks to this magnetic activity, the Sun shines more brightly in extreme ultraviolet light, and also sends out streams of charged particles into space more often.  

The individual images were taken at a wavelength of 28.4 nanometres and show gas with a temperature of about two million degrees Celsius in the Sun’s atmosphere, or corona. Click here to compare SOHO's different views of the Sun.  

Read more about the mission's achievements 

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[Image description: On a black background, a montage of images of the Sun arranged in a serpentine chain of two-and-a-half nested upside-down ‘V’s. Along the chain, the Sun periodically alternates between being darker with little activity (left and right sides of the chain) and being brighter with more active regions (centre of the chain, at the peaks of the upside-down ‘V’s).]