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.
A Solar Prominence "on LaunchPad"
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Chunming Zhu
Maybe we already witnessed many launches of rockets on Earth, waiting minutes even hours before the exciting moment when a rocket got ignited and launched. Here is a video from IRIS displaying a marvelous prominence at the solar northeastern limb, roughly 10 hours before its eruption. The prominence appears to be vertical, like a rocket standing there before launch. At the moment of its eruption, IRIS was tracking a filament nearby, which could have been affected by the prominence eruption. IRIS tracked the evolution of both prominence and filament for days.