IRIS Movie of the Day
At least once a week a movie of the Sun taken by NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) is posted by one of the scientists operating the instrument.
IRIS observation of a prominence on the west limb
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Vanessa Polito
Quiescent prominences are cool and dense clouds of ionized gas that form in the hot corona. Although they are called "quiescent", they host a large range of dynamics at different spatial scales, and plasma instabilities. On July 11-12, the IRIS slit crossed a quiescent prominence on the west limb, revealing interesting dynamics in this cold bubble.