Thermonuclear art: NASA's ultra hi-def video shows the Sun as you've never seen it before

NASA has captured amazing ultra-high definition footage of the sun for a 30 minute film called 'Thermonuclear art'
NASA has released footage of the Sun shot in ultra-high definition.
The breathtaking video shows our parent star in amazing detail - and it won't hurt your eyes to look at it.
The 30-minute video is called "Thermonuclear Art" and was shot by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spacecraft.
Ultra-high definition, also known as 4K, is four times as detailed as standard 1080p footage.
"SDO captures images of the Sun in 10 different wavelengths, each of which helps highlight a different temperature of solar material," wrote NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in a statement accompanying the video.
Different temperatures can, in turn, show specific structures on the sun, such as solar flares, which are gigantic explosions of light and x-rays, or coronal loops, which are stream of solar material traveling up and down looping magnetic field lines."
According to Nasa, it takes 10 hours for a specially-trained media team to make just one minute of the finished video.
The SDO watches the Sun in different wavelengths to monitor the different temperatures on the surface and to try and work out what causes the dramatic eruptions. These are represented by different colours in the video.
The Observatory is also trying to work out what makes the Sun's atmosphere - the corona - up to 1,000 times hotter than the surface and why the star's magnetic fields shift so much.