With a Hydrogen Gas Prominence

Here’s the Sun as seen today through the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) today (August 28), with a few prominences dancing around along the limb (edge).  Those are clouds of hot hydrogen gas streaming out along magnetic field lines from the sun’s “surface.”  They may look small, but these fingers and prominences are thousands and thousands of kilometers long. They make handy targets through telescopes equipped with special solar filters.

Here’s just such a view from observer Pete Lawrence of Selsey, UK. It was posted on Spaceweather.com.

(Note: Earth has been added for scale — this is not a prominence reaching out for our planet.)

As they say over there, this does make you feel kind of small.