Bright stars of the Pleiades, four planets, and erupting solar plasma are all captured in this
spectacular image from the space-based SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). In the foreground of the 15 degree wide field of view, a bubble of hot plasma, called a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), is blasting away from the
active Sun whose position and relative size is indicated by the central white circle.
Beyond appear four of the five naked-eye
planets --
courtesy of the
planetary alignment which did not destroy the world! In the background are distant stars and the famous
Pleiades star cluster, also easily visible to the unaided eye when it shines in the night sky. Distances for these
familiar celestial objects are; the
Sun, 150 million kilometers away; Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn, about 58, 110, 780, and 1,400 million kilometers beyond the Sun respectively; and the
Pleiades star cluster at a mere 3,800 trillion kilometers (400 light-years). SOHO itself orbits 1.5 million kilometers sunward of planet Earth. The
image was recorded by the Large Angle and Spectrometric COronagraph (LASCO) instrument on board SOHO on Monday, May 15 at 10:42 UT.