Solar Dynamics Observatory - 14th December

This winter hasn't been obliging in letting me get some observations of our star in, so I decided to turn to the SDO which is not plagued by bad weather, low altitude sun etc.  The data from NASA is all 'free to use' and so decided to take a look what was available and see if could present it in a form that was suitable for this website and forums.  This GIF animation was created in Photoshop CS4 using the 'SDO movie of the day' as the source material.  I plan to put the technique together as a youtube tutorial and put this in the imaging tutorials section of this website. 

What I think this animation does show very well, is that despite our star apparently being pretty quiet from our perspective on Earth on friday 14th december, at these extremely short ultra violet regions it can be seen flaring away and throwing huge clouds of plasma out into space.  Earth would only be a few pixels wide on this scale, and this brings home just how insignificant we are in the scale of the universe.