Around 13:00 UTC (8:00 EST) on July 28, 2010, a prominence on the southeast limb of the sun became unstable.
The prominence erupted sending an immense amount of solar plasma and magnetic field away from the sun into space. Amateur astronomer David Evans took pictures of the prominence with a telescope while the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) observed the eruption.
This video shows David Evan’s photograph on the left and a video from SDO in the 304 Angstrom wavelength on the right. The image is rotated but a small image of the sun is next to the prominence to show its location.
An image of the Earth has been added to show the scale of the prominence.
(credit: David Evans and spaceweather.com)
David Evans took the picture from his backyard observatory in Coleshill, North Warwickshire, UK. “This was a huge event,” he says. “It just goes to show how the sun can surprise observers even at this ‘low’ phase of the solar cycle.”
David Evans took the picture from his backyard observatory in Coleshill, North Warwickshire, UK.
