One of the biggest prominences in years erupted from the sun's northwestern limb on April 13th. The massive plasma-filled structure rose up and burst during a ~2 hour period. Observers in Europe had a great view as you can see from the pictures below.The eruption hurled a bright coronal mass ejection, CME, into space. The expanding cloud could deliver a glancing blow to Earth's magnetic field (Northern Light) around April 15th. Northern America and Scandinavia has a 35% estimate of polar geomagnetic activity when the CME arrives.
On Saturday, April 11th, a CME hit Earth's magnetic field. The impact caused a geomagnetic storm and, for the first time this year, ignited auroras over the continental United States and Scandinavia. "The lights were bright enough to produce a reflection from the surface of Lake Superior," says photographer Shawn Malone, who recorded the scene from a beach in Marquette, Michigan:
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