Solar Prominences / Filaments

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During "totality" on Monday many people (including me) saw what appeared to be fire-like projections or dots from the sun that extended beyond the moon's coverage of the sun. These are solar prominences or filaments that are plasma and often in a loop shape. And they're huge!

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Sun's diameter = ~865,000 miles

Earth's diameter = ~8,000 miles

Moon's diameter = ~2,000 miles

Solar prominence extends from sun = ~25,000 to ~80,000 miles (3 to 10 times bigger than the diameter of the Earth)

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- Photo #1 below is from a friend of a friend and taken with a telescope - beautiful prominence! Hard to imagine that it's over 25,000 miles long!

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- Photo #2 taken with my iphone zoomed a bit. You can see the red glow from a prominence - to the naked eye (not visible in this photo) it looked like a red line extending from the sun and visible outside of the moon's coverage. It was reported that many people saw this. Would love to hear from you if you did.

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- Photo #3 is taken with my iphone without any zoom. Ya know, pictures just rarely do justice to the real thing do they? In real life, instead of the bright, blurred light in the photo around the moon, it was a dimmer light that created a beautiful frame for a dark moon. What an experience and a perfect picture of Psalm 19:1 - the heavens declare His glory.

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- Photo #4 - We traveled from Franklin TN to Cape Girardeau, Missouri to see totality. Cape Girardeau is a nice town on the Mississippi River with lots of history. This photo is on a flood wall built to protect the downtown area that's 100 feet or so from the river and it lists the dates and levels of previous floods. I grew up a few miles from the Mississippi river but seeing that magnificent river never gets old!

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