Okay, okay. You got me. This isn't actually an APOD post. It's an AVOD post. An Astronomy Video of the Day! Our friends at NASA rarely feature videos for their APOD so when they do, you know it's got to be good. Well, it is. The thirteen second video features a solar prominence which happened on December 6th and is really really cool. The prominence was almost a million km long. Astronomers note that this particular filament had been seen hovering above the Sun's surface for over a week before it exploded. A filament is a large region of dense, cool gas that is held in the chromosphere by magnetic fields. This image sequence was taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, an orbiter launched February last year to observe the sun for five years. The plasma cloud emitted by this coronal mass eruption missed the Earth and thus did not cause any auroras. But the sun is nearing Solar Maximum Activity so we'll being seeing more auroras and cool stuff like that soon enough.
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