HUGE SOLAR PROMINENCE: There is a prominence jutting out from the sun’s southwestern limb today. It is so big, astronomers are struggling to squeeze it into a single photograph. “I had to mosaic 6 exposures to capture the whole thing,” says Philippe Tosi, who sends this stitched-together image from Nîmes, France:
Tosi inserted an image of Earth for scale. The wall of plasma is more than five times taller than our entire planet.
Structures like this, in which scorching hot plasma is held very high by dynamic magnetic fields, are inherently unstable. If the prominence erupts in the next couple of days, amateur astronomers will get a fantastic side-on view of its disintegration.