The ESA/NASA SOHO spacecraft took a beautiful picture of an enormous prominence, 700,000 kilometres across, ejected from the surface of the Sun. An "eruptive prominence" is a mass of relatively cool plasma - only 80,000 C, instead of 1-2 million C in the upper atmosphere of the Sun. These are usually associated with coronal mass ejections (CMEs), and can affect the Earth's magnetosphere when they come our way.