ERUPTION: The day before Thanksgiving, however, was not so quiet. On Nov. 23rd, a magnetic filament wrapping around the sun’s NW limb rose up and erupted. Click on the arrow to play the movie recorded by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory:

The eruption hurled a cloud of plasma (a “CME”) into space but not toward Earth. Because of the blast site’s high-northern location on the sun, the cloud flew up and out of the plane of the solar system; no planets will be affected.