Wow, what a day ! This morning started with an excited post from our own Gary Palmer in the UK about an incredibly large solar prominence visible on the SW limb of the Sun. It was still dark here when I read the post so I checked the NASA SDO live images from the left side of solarastronomy.org and low and behold there was an ENORMOUS arching prominence just teasing me to drop all plans for the day and roll out the scopes! This thing was gigantic and growing fast as I watched each 7 minute update from NSASA SDO until the Sun was high enough for me to see it. The news spread quick thanks to the Charlie Bates Solar Astronomy Project global web of solar observers and soon populated every solar minded page on the internet! You could just feel the excitement coming from all around the world. The incredible network of social media followers and outreach minded people that have all come together to make this the highest volume astronomy outreach program on the planet became mobilized with the instant news! But alas, today was reserved mostly for the UK astronomers as our members Gary Palmer , Paul Andrew, Mark Townley, Stephen Jennette and Pete Lawrence got the best views of this monster as it grew, grew, grew and then grew some more! before tossing its contents to the solar wind. All in all a very exciting day for solar astronomy and the instant global communication of some of the worlds best solar imagers has allowed for all of us to see one of the largest prominences in the last 20 years imaged by the best right here on our site. Congrats members for making this an incredible web portal and thanks for the membership. :)
Posted on: Sat, 26 Jul 2014 22:30:53 +0000
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