Incredible image of the solar explosion from this morning

Also www.helioviewer.org has incredible video of the event.

Description from Bad Astronomy http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/07/the-sun-lets-loose-a-huge-explosion/#more-32956
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What you’re seeing here is a solar flare (an enormous explosion of pent-up magnetic energy) coupled with a prominence (a physical eruption of gas from the surface). This event blasted something like a billion tons of material away from the Sun. Note the size of it, too: while it started from a small region on the Sun’s surface, it quickly expanded into a plume easily as big as the Sun itself! I’d estimate its size at well over a million kilometers across. It looks like most of the material fell back down to the Sun’s surface; that’s common, though sometimes such an event manages to blast the material completely away into space.

...

Again, the good news is that we’re not in any danger from this; it wasn’t aimed our way (most of these types of events miss us). But as I’ve said before, the solar cycle is heating up and we can expect to see more incredible events from our friendly neighborhood star in the coming years.

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The helioviewer footage shows the plume's movement. Quite spectacular.

size because of its deflection and direction of discharge.
It was rather spectacular though

more here on the warning:
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/

serious aurora activity tonight. Uff da!

on edit:

The arrogant moon-men had it coming, tho.

Though the blowing up the moon thread is one of the gems of this site.

I mean hot!

Maybe it was a radical Christian fundie group opposed to sun worshipers.

;-)

Hmph, we have politicians whose egos weigh more than that.

:hi:

It must have read a twitter.