Astrophotographer Captures Giant Human-Shaped Solar Prominence

Arizona-based astrophotographer Mark Johnston aimed his telescope at the horizon in a Scottsdale backyard garden on May 31, 2026, but saw a sight never seen before. Pointing a hydrogen-alpha filter towards the sun's edge, he managed to record a giant cloud of plasma that looked like a giant standing still, rising from the sun's limb. Earlier, on May 22, an entirely different prominence ejected large quantities of matter into space in a phenomenon called coronal rain.

Magnetism Runs the Show

According to NASA, solar prominences are these massive plasma formations, sort of cooler and more packed than the nearby corona, and they just hang there above the sun because the sun's magnetic field is keeping them up. You can spot them as bright, glowing archways along the edge limb, while on the brighter solar disk, they show up more like dark ribbons, usually called filaments. Johnston said the whole “wind-swept” feeling in the plasma's movement is kind of misleading, because the ionised hydrogen is really being carried along unseen magnetic field strands, and gravity, well, it only plays a smaller part in the story.

No Fire, Just Physics

Contrary to appearances, Johnston is quick to dispel the myth that there is actually a flame burning on the sun. The sun's surface is filled with hydrogen plasma, which lights up due to being extremely hot rather than burning – like a stove's surface burning bright red without undergoing any actual combustion. The images were captured using a telescope with a hydrogen-alpha filter on a 160mm refractor, allowing him to record the unique 656.3 nanometer wavelength of hydrogen emission. Regular telescopes can see nothing at all. These observations are especially useful during solar maxima, when eruptions become more frequent.