Okay, I got distracted multiple times and I’ve lost the post that was looking for this info, so I’m hoping they’re one of my followers…

Someone asked if the prominence that was, uh, prominent during the solar eclipse came from the sunspot group that was giving us all the nice aurora the other night.

My first impulse was to say no, because the two events were over a month apart and sunspots change a lot over that much time.

So this is cool - “SOHO, the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory, is a project of international collaboration between ESA and NASA to study the Sun from its deep core to the outer corona and the solar wind.” (From their website 😉) They have a tool where you can make your own timelapse movies from their data! You can find it at
https://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/data/Theater/

So I made a time-lapse of the Sun from April 7 to May 11. Around the time of the April 8 eclipse, there is a sunspot off to the side–*possibly* responsible for the prominence–but it isn't the one responsible for the outbursts that caused the aurora. THAT sunspot group first appears and grows starting around May 1.

#Astronomy #Eclipse #Aurora #SOHO