NASA's sun-observing IRIS spacecraft has gotten its first close-up look at a colossal coronal mass ejection erupting from the sun, and boy howdy is it beautiful.

In the video above, a tremendous sheet of solar material can be seen erupting from our parent star. Watch as it rapidly consumes a field of view five-Earths wide and seven-and-a-half-Earths tall, emanating outward from the sun at speeds of 1.5-million miles per hour. The view is unprecedented for IRIS, which launched in June of last year to observe the lowest levels of the sun's atmosphere with better resolution than ever before.


Via NASA: