Hand-drawn animation of 43 years of the Sun’s weather

Artist and programmer Jeff Thompson has compiled 15,000 hand-drawn maps of the Sun made by astronomers into a single video, creating a mesmerizing and delightfully makeshift stop-motion animation of the Sun’s activity over the last 43 years. Astronomers have been drawing these “solar synoptic maps” since 1956 in order to keep track of the Sun’s “weather”…sunspots, flares, and the like. (via slate)

• astronomy
• Jeff Thompson
• science
• Sun
• video