Contains:  Solar system body or event
Animation of Prominence-Coronal Rain Hybrid (The weirdest prominence that I have ever seen, Photon Torpedoes and Plasma Bombs), DWS 23

Animation of Prominence-Coronal Rain Hybrid (The weirdest prominence that I have ever seen, Photon Torpedoes and Plasma Bombs)

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

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This is one of the weirdest solar activities that I have ever seen, let alone imaged. According to Dr. Patrick Antolin from Northumbria University (Department: Mathematics, Physics and Electrical Engineering), who was kind enough to identify this strange activity for me, stated the following: 

" I am familiar with the kind of prominences shown in your sequence. Those are called prominence-coronal rain hybrids, which, as the name suggests, are partly prominence (the top part) and coronal rain (the bottom part). These are due to the strong change in magnetic topology with height."

Since these are fairly rare, I consider myself extremely lucky to have had the opportunity to capture this. Right time, right place, clear skies and everything worked. Now that is what I call real Lucky Imaging! The sequence lasted roughly 80 minutes and consists of 39 frames.

From Andrew Rosado:

Coronal rain and Solar prominences are very similar processes, both involve cool material at chromospheric temperatures within the blistering corona. They play important roles as part of the return flow of the chromosphere-corona mass cycle. Now, coronal rain is a phenomenon that results from hot ionized plasma cooling and condensing within the powerful magnetic tubes. This condensing, and therefore denser, plasma has a stronger interaction with the Sun’s gravity and drips down to the photosphere. As this is a hybrid, I will also go over prominences briefly. A prominence is an extremely fascinating solar phenomena in which jets of ionized plasma are thermally insulated by the magnetic field tubes that guide and contain them, as a result of the thermal gradient you can observe different optical densities that result in distinct structures. This is a rare example of both phenomena occurring together as a hybrid formation and is very interesting to see.



If you’re interested in a bit more about me and the telescope, feel free to watch a presentation that I gave to The Astro Imaging Channel (awesome site) on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm5boF-5hpc&t=3370s

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