NASA caught this huge solar storm coming off the surface of the sun last week. The storm was visible for days, which they say is very rare. When it burst from the sun it was long enough to stretch from the Earth to the Moon.
From the Flickr description of the video, from NASA Goddard:
A very large and bright prominence erupted off the surface of the Sun around 19:00 UT on August 31, 2012 and just kept going. This video from the STEREO Behind spacecraft shows the prominence and the coronal mass ejection (CME) in which it is embedded as it leaves the Sun (orange, EUVI) and travels through the fields of view of COR1 (green), COR2 (red), and HI1 (blue) telescopes before it finally disappears from HI1 around the end of September 2, still clearly visible more than two days after it erupted.
Venus is also visible in the video. It's directly opposite the sun — the sun storm, or coronal mass ejection (CME) is coming right at it. This causes two weird artifacts: A halo around the planet and a weird loop near the sun at the beginning of the video. Watch below to see the CME in action.
(via Bad Astronomer's Twitter)
SEE ALSO: The awesome pictures of the sun storm in the act of erupting and another video of the flare in action.