Hey Space Placers!
I have seen a lot of solar eruptions, flares and prominences in my day but I have NEVER seen anything like what happened on the Sun 6-7-11. Neither have some of the solar scientists who studied the outburst. There was even a press release from Goddard Space Flight Center about the event:
"The Sun unleashed an M-2 (medium-sized) solar flare, an S1-class (minor) radiation storm and a spectacular coronal mass ejection (CME) on June 7, 2011, from sunspot complex 1226-1227. The large cloud of particles mushroomed up and fell back down looking as if it covered an area of almost half the solar surface. The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) observed the flare's peak at 1:41 a.m. EDT (06:41 UTC). SDO recorded these images (above) in extreme ultraviolet light that show a very large eruption of cool gas. It is somewhat unique because at many places in the eruption there seems to be even cooler material -- at temperatures less than 80,000 K."
Spectacular video was posted on YouTube and had quite a few hits. You can read more about it: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/News060711-blast.html
Sky Guy in VA
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