On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled away from the sun at over 900 miles per second.

This movie shows the ejection from a variety of viewpoints as captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), and the joint ESA/NASA Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).

Follow this up with this video primer of how SDO, STEREO, and SOHO work together to send us these phenomenal views of the sun’s entire surface and atmosphere.

via io9.com.

Did you catch the Solar Dynamics Observatory’s videos of Venus crossing in front of the sun? 

On June 5 2012, SDO collected images of the rarest predictable solar event—the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. This event lasted approximately 6 hours and happens in pairs eight years apart, which are separated from each other by 105 or 121 years. The last transit was in 2004 and the next will not happen until 2117.

For more, YouTube user scottieM3 animated the Astronomy Picture of the Day’s images to see the entire sun as Venus passed it, and It’s Okay to Be Smart reminds us that though it looks like Venus is super close to the sun and might disappear into it, “that it’s still 108 million kilometers away.”

More about the sun and planets from our archives.

Launched in October 2006, STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) traces the flow of energy and matter from the sun to Earth. It also provides unique and revolutionary views of the sun-Earth system. STEREO, when paired with SDO, can now give us the first complete view of the sun’s entire surface and atmosphere. 

Speaking of SDO, the Solar Dynamics Observatory team just posted two videos: one of a recent large prominence eruption and one of “darker, cooler plasma” being pulled back and forth by competing magnetic forces. They were observed above the Sun’s surface for 30 hours (Feb. 7-8, 2012).