Astrophotographer Miguel Claro posted a video of a massive loop of plasma dancing on the surface of the sun.
The timelapse video, taking place over two days, shows a breathtaking scene of a gigantic solar prominence that was visible for two days in February in 2022. Claro took as many images as he could of the event, capturing 692 raw videos of 900 frames each, of which he utilized about 22% to create his video.
One photo from the collection was recognized by the Royal Observatory of Greenwich Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition, winning “Highly Commended” honors in the “Our Sun” category.
Claro utilized several thousand dollars worth of professional-grade, but off-the-shelf, equipment, shooting the images at Portugal’s Alqueva Dark Sky Reserve.
“The final result is a 4k high-resolution solar movie comprising around 2.5 hours for each day, with a total of 5 hours of images,” Claro wrote on his website.
The video shared by Claro displays images of Mars, Saturn and Jupiter to show the scale of the prominence, which by Claro’s estimates was about 10 times the size of Earth in height and stretched for significantly longer across the surface of the Sun.
After two days, the prominence erupted, sending out a blast of plasma into space called a coronal mass ejection (CME).
The CME did not hit Earth, but previous CMEs have wreaked havoc on modern technology, causing blackouts. The largest ever recorded, known as the Carrington Event, occurred in 1859 and disabled parts of the United States telegraph network, shocking operators and setting equipment on fire in some areas. It is believed that a repeat of such an event would be disastrous for technology if it happened today.
The majority of the effects from small and normal CME events are blunted by Earth’s magnetosphere.