For the first time ever, NASA has been able to capture a massive solar eruption with unprecedented detail using IRIS, a highly sensitive instrument that can only cover a relatively small zone of the sun at any give time. Catching this involved “some educated guesses and a little bit of luck.”
The video made by the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph is impressive. Keep in mind that the video is covering an area “five Earth’s wide and about seven and a half Earth’s tall.”