Major far side coronal mass ejection

Sunday, 23 July 2017 11:05 UTC

⇧ The coronal mass ejection as captured by the SOHO/LASCO C2 coronagraph. 

it is a very fast and dense symmetrical full halo coronal mass ejection. A very impressive event indeed but do note that it came from the far side and the plasma cloud is directed away from us. There is no chance that it will arrive at Earth. It is very rare we see such fast and nice halo eruptions and if it would be earth-directed these kind of plasma clouds could easily cause severe to extreme geomagnetic storming.

Source of this massive plasma cloud looks to be a solar flare from old sunspot region 2665 as you can see on our header image at the top of this page. We do not have a satellite like the GOES-series that monitors far side solar X-ray emissions but using STEREO imagery it looks like this was at least a high M-class solar flare, perhaps an X1 event.

Amazing to look at, but (un)fortunately not aimed at our planet!