This is hot: Check out this video of the solar corona in all its glory

Last month's total solar eclipse wasn't the only fun with the sun sky watchers are enjoying this year. The European Science Agency has just released a hot new video of the solar corona, the upper layer of the sun's atmosphere. The agency's solar orbiter captured the footage on September 23, 2023, and the group annotated the 30-second video to give viewers context about what they are seeing.

Just a few seconds later, you catch a glimpse of coronal moss, a bright gas that creates lacy patterns on the sun. A few seconds later, ESA points out spicules on the horizon – spikes of gas rising through the Sun's chromosphere. These towers can reach heights of 10,000 kilometers or about 6,200 miles. The video also shows what appears to be a small burst at the 22-second mark. “Small” is relative, as ESA notes that the eruption was larger than Earth.

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The clip ends with a look at the coronal rain, which consists of high-density clumps of plasma sizzling at a temperature of about 10,000 degrees Celsius (18,032 Fahrenheit). For comparison, the brighter coronal loop around the rain burns at 1 million degrees Celsius (1.8 million Fahrenheit). In short, rain showers on the sun are crazy.

Snake crosses the sun

Overall, this is some of the best video footage we little humans have ever seen of the sun. This is thanks to ESA's solar orbiter and its extreme ultraviolet imager, launched as part of ESA's mission to capture close-up images of the Sun in an unprecedented way. The mission began in 2020 with the launch of the solar orbiter and captured amazing images of the Sun in 2022, as well as some shots of Earth, Mars and Venus.

Perhaps the most intense images to date have come from a massive solar flare that stretched millions of kilometers into space, and later images that appear to be a snake gliding across the sun. According to NASA, which supports ESA, the serpentine effect was caused by the mixing of plasma and the Sun's magnetic field.

The mission also gave us the first close-up views of the Sun's polar regions and measurements of solar winds that were not possible on Earth.

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