"Verstaldin" wrote in message
...
While prominences and flares can be exciting in an esthetic sense, the
reality behind those beautiful pitcures is terrifying.

Our local star is wonderful and stable, but being that it is basically a
gigantic nuclear reactor, it's also inherently nasty. The only reason we
live in peace with it is because of our thick, protective magnetic field and
our ozone layer. There are massive doses of UV, x-rays and gamma rays thrown
out in one major x-class flare. Even some of the smaller solar flares are
larger than the entire Earth. The bigger ones are larger than many Earths
strung end-to-end.

Our observatory has a telescope that is specifically designed to look at the
Sun in a specific wavelength of light, known as hydrogen alpha (H-alpha). It
only allows you to view in a certain small slice of light wavelength (the
alpha emission line in the red end of the spectrum), but that is where all
the action is. When the Sun is really active, you can see solar flares,
prominences and even the boiling "granulation" that marks the photosphere*
of the Sun through this scope. You can see the surface of the Sun literally
change before your eyes.

Four years ago when the Sun was more active than now, I was watching
gigantic loops of superheated hydrogen gas coming out of sunspots and
looping back into them again. To see that kind of detail from the Earth just
takes your breath away. Here's a picture pretty similar to what I saw:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...te_000926.html

Jackie

*The Sun technically has no solid surface, but what appears to us as a
surface, we refer to as the photosphere.