Most people will say that title sounds a little rude, but looking at these latest images from the Solar Dynamics Observatory of the Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) that happened on the 31st of August 2012, I have to say: there nothing short of being the sexiest pieces of Sun photography I’ve seen.


NASA says it was due to a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun’s atmosphere (the corona) that erupted out into space, the CME then travelled at over 900 miles per second. Luckily the CME did not travel directly towards the Earth, but did connect slightly with Earth’s magnetic environment, or magnetosphere (fab word) causing swirls of green and red appear in an amazing aurora over Whitehorse, Yukon on the night of Monday, September 3, thankfully David Cartier was on hand to capture the amazing event.

© David Cartier 2012.

(All other images courtesy of NASA Goddard under their Creative Commons License)