Solar flare animation.

Solar flare animation.  A hot new area of research in more ways than one is the Sun. Mark Townley over at Brierley Hill Solar captured this solar flare that took place on 28 August 2014.

The animation is pretty impressive, considering this is the real deal and not some kind of "re-creation" or "representation" or anything like that. This is what happens to the Sun all the time. It wasn't as impressive as some solar eruptions, perhaps, but it's pretty darn cool anyway.

Imagine what that would do to the earth if some volcano here erupted like that, throwing stuff all the way out into space? That is just a massive event, and of course, the Sun is massively larger than the Earth, so while this eruption appears relatively small - it's not small at all.

this is a really good angle to capture the flare. It would not have looked nearly as impressive head-on. If you look closely, you can see some other unrelated activity on the sun's surface as well.


From Mark Townley's page, which also has many other interesting astronomical animations:

AR12146 was very nearly on the limb of the sun, and had a beta-gamma-delta magnetic field that had potential for eruptions, in fact NASA gave a 40% chance of an M-class flare and a 5% chance of an X-class flare.  The clouds finally broke on thursday afternoon, and so I decided to train my telescope on this region, and using the autorun feature in firecapture image acquisition software and the Hutech solar guider to lock onto our star I set about recording a timelapse of our star.  Now while the larger flares didn't happen, there was a small C1 class eruption that was still the largest explosion for several light years that hurled out a large blob of plasma out into inter planetary space several times larger than Earth.  This animation shows you don't need a large or overly expensive solar scope to view these events on our sun, and was taken with a 40mm Coronado scope and Imaging Source DMK31 camera.

2020