NASA has captured many striking images of solar activity in the past. But one of the most recent ones may its most remarkable yet.
NASA has captured many striking images of solar activity in the past.
But one of the most recent ones may its most remarkable yet.
NASA notes that
"A coronal mass ejection burst off the side of the sun on May 9, 2014. The giant sheet of solar material erupting was the first CME seen by NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS. The field of view seen here is about five Earth's wide and about seven and a half Earth's tall."
Many of the imagery we have seen of the solar flares in the recent past have been captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory or SDO.
As a point of comparison, NASA's video shows what that coronal mass ejection looks like through SDO and IRIS.
According to NASA - The IRIS Observatory was designed by and the mission is managed by Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Laboratory. NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, provides mission operations and ground data systems.