SOLAR ACTIVITY: Old sunspot 1045 still has some life left in it. On March 1st, beginning at 2245 UT, magnetic fields around the much-decayed active region erupted for more than three hours. STEREO-B had an excellent view of the blast, shown here in a snapshot through the spacecraft's extreme ultraviolet telescope:
Click here to set the scene in motion
The eruption hurled a billion-ton CME away from the sun (image above), but not toward Earth. The blast site is located on the sun's eastern limb where it faces away from our planet. This marks the fourth time in the past two days that a CME has billowed away from the sun without heading in our direction. Earth keeps dodging the bullet.
