December 29, 2009 CME

2009 in the morning a slow-moving coronal mass ejection (CME) lumbered over the western limb of the sun. A coronagraph onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) recorded the eruption. The billion-ton cloud could have come from any of several active regions now on the back side of the sun--namely, former sunspots 1035, 1036 and/or 1038. Earth is not in the cloud's path (and neither is Venus, despite how it looks in the SOHO movie) so the event will not produce any Northern Lights ...


















