A summary of the June 1999 Filament

This is a particularly large filament that, as you can see, takes up the full lateral field of view of the sun. This image comes from the day before the filament erupts. Notice how it does not seem as clearly defined as the September 1997 filament, but is a lot larger.

Here are the usual collection of general images to start off with. It seems that the two main things of note from these pictures are that the filament is not nearly as clear in the helium-1 picture as I would perhaps have expected, and that there is a dark patch in the ultra-violet EIT picture that corresponds to the position of the filament. It is difficult to make out anything near the south pole on the MDI picture (see further down the page!).

This is a movie of the filament as it forms. It takes in over a month of daily hydrogen-alpha images, so you see the filament start to form, disappear out of sight, and then return. If you slow the movie down (possibly even use the step function) you can see it much better. I'm sorry it's jumpy, but it's very hard to make these movies smooth in the time I have. Anyway, if you look at image number 40 (out of 41) you can see where there is a big gap in the filament suddenly, due to it erupting.

I have produced a series of overlayed magnetogram/h-alpha images for this filament. They work best on their own page, so to see them click here.

Finally, here's a picture of the eruption of the prominence. It is from the EIT instrument from SOHO, and shows a fantastic loop coming out from the limb of the sun, very close to the south pole. Click on the thumbnail for it.

This is another picture of the eruption. The center of the sun has been blocked out and you can see the coronal mass ejection extremely clearly. Click on the thumbnail to enlarge it.

Here's an x-ray image of the eruption. Notice that where there was no bright point near the south pole at all on the first youhkoh image, there is now a giant bright patch where the filament has erupted.

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Finally, here's a picture of the eruption of the prominence. It is from the EIT instrument from SOHO, and shows a fantastic loop coming out from the limb of the sun, very close to the south pole. Click on the thumbnail for it.
This is another picture of the eruption. The center of the sun has been blocked out and you can see the coronal mass ejection extremely clearly. Click on the thumbnail to enlarge it.
Here's an x-ray image of the eruption. Notice that where there was no bright point near the south pole at all on the first youhkoh image, there is now a giant bright patch where the filament has erupted.