A Fiery CME

Caption: Another spectacular Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) took off from the Sun in the early hours of January 4, starting off as a filament eruption seen by the Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) in the 195 Å images. The complexity and structure of the CME as it passed through the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) C2 and C3 fields of view amazed even experienced solar physicists at the SOHO operations center.

Although the center of the CME was directed almost a full 90 degrees away from the Sun-Earth connection line, it still appeared as a (weak) full halo event, opening up the possibility of a small impact on Earth's space weather. However, no clear effect was recorded.

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