Huge Eruption on the Sun Revisited in Spectacular HD

By Nancy Atkinson - September 5, 2012 at 9:29 PM UTC | Solar Astronomy
earth-to-scale.jpg

This one may truly knock your socks off. Remember the spectacular filament eruption on the Sun on August 31 that

we posted last week

? The folks from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio now have put out a video of the eruption in high definition, and it is definitely worth watching to witness the awesome power of the Sun. The new video also includes data from STEREO and SOHO -- as well as the data from the Solar Dynamics Observatory -- so the tremendous Coronal Mass Ejection is visible as it travels outward from the Sun. Wow.

Below is an image of the filament eruption that includes a scale model of Earth. As the

@NASAGoddard Twitter feed

posted: "Reason #1 why it's a REALLY good thing that the sun is 93,000,000 miles 150 million km) from Earth.... [mind blowing photo]"

The image above includes an image of Earth to show the size of the filament eruption compared to the size of Earth. Credit: NASA/GSFC/SDO

Thanks to Scott Wiessinger and the

Scientific Visualization Studio

for the great video and images.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com