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.
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21 Feb 2020
Prominence footpoint
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Magnus Woods
Prominences are large structures composed of cool plasma supported by twisted magnetic fields high in the solar atmosphere. Called prominences when seen in profile above the limb of the Sun, when seen on the solar disk these structures are called filaments. The plasma and magnetic fields that make up prominences and filaments are highly changeable, with large morphological changes occurring over short periods of time. This can make getting perfectly lined up observations of them quite tricky!