A large solar prominence, shaped like a sea-horse to the imaginative, is seen here during the 1991 total solar eclipse . A prominence is a dense cloud of incandescent ionized solar gas projecting above the sun's chromosphere into the corona and held in place by the sun's magnetic field.
Prominences can last hours and even days.
The chromosphere is the lowest layer of the sun's atmosphere. It is several thousand miles thick and bright pink in color in this photograph. The corona is the extremely tenuous outer atmosphere of the sun and is seen here as the faint blue-white glow above the chromosphere. The extreme outer corona of the sun extends well out into the solar system, past the Earth. When energetic solar particles in the corona interact with the Earth's magnetic field, an aurora can form.