According to NASA, who took this image with its Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft, this is a “rather large-sized” solar flare. This gorgeous fin of molten plasma “swirled and twisted” for nearly 90-minutes on Wednesday—some of it eventually ejected out into space, and the rest collapsed back onto the sun to wait for the next show.Also: not to get all political or whatever in the presence of this awesome, beautiful thing, but this is just one of the many, many, many amazing projects that NASA does constantly that do not require shooting human beings in inefficient, unwieldy space shuttles through the atmosphere into lower Earth orbit. Perhaps that’s a comforting thought.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.