Prominences - Egypt 2006

This is a view of the total eclipse of the sun in March 2006, just a moment before the beginning of totality. The picture was taken from extreme northwestern Egypt, just a few miles from the Libyan border.

The glowing red layer is the sun's chromosphere, a thin layer that glows red with the light of ionized hydrogen. The chromosphere includes prominences, which are jets of hot hydrogen gas that shoot thousands of miles above the sun's surface under the influence of irregularities in the sun's magnetic field. A particularly large prominence can be seen at the top right of this image.

This image is copyright (c) by Bert Halstead, 2006.