It's difficult to put the massive size of a sunspot into perspective, butJames Tyrwhitt-Drakehas released a time-lapse video that may help with that conundrum.

The video at the top of this page was created by the Infinity Imagined blogger by stringing together more than 17,000 images of the sunspot, as they were captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, according to the Huffington Post. In the clip, Earth is projected next to the sunspot to provide scale and allow the human brain to comprehend just how big this sunspot actually is.

The sunspot has been named "AR 2192" by NASA, and at 80,000 miles wide, it's roughly the same diameter as Jupiter.

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CNET reports that the video condensed 16.5 days into less than eight minutes. NASA scientist C. Alex Young told Space.com they're unsure of what caused the solar flare to grow so massive in size, but it's definitely the biggest they've observed on the sun in at least 24 years.

"Being close to solar maximum [the peak in the sun's 11-year solar cycle] means there is more concentrated magnetic field and magnetic energy under the solar surface waiting to bubble up," he said in the report. "But the question of why it comes up as one spot instead of two or more is really still unknown, a mystery."

For a zoomed-out view of the sun that shows the sunspot in a better scale, Tyrwhitt-Drake posted a second time-lapse video to his YouTube page. And yes, of course there's an animated GIF, which was posted in the Huffington Post report:

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This close-up look at an active region taken on July 9, 2010, shows a hotbed of magnetic activity, including a small solar flare bursting out into space. (NASA Solar Dynamics Laboratory)