Want To See A Big-Ass Solar Eruption?

Sure you do! Here’s a video NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center put together of a coronal mass ejection, or CME, in late August. And yes, this is real, live video. Not CGI, not an artist’s rendering: This is the real thing.

Put this in full frame and HD. Seriously, it’s gorgeous.

This was assembled by NASA using footage and stills from three different solar observatories, and the results are pretty amazing. But this is really just the YouTube video: NASA has nine versions of this video in various qualities for free download on their website. They’ve got images of this CME at various points on the light spectrum.

This is the kind of thing I keep in bookmarks whenever somebody on Facebook whines about the money we give to NASA. Beyond the awe-inspiring nature of this video, the more we understand the universe around us, and more important the more we share that information, the better we understand ourselves and our place in the universe.

Also, it looks really cool. I can’t emphasize the importance of this enough.