LASCO C3 images have a large field of view: They encompass 32 diameters of the Sun. To put this in perspective, the diameter of the images is 45 million kilometers (about 30 million miles) at the distance of the Sun, or half of the diameter of the orbit of Mercury. Many bright stars can be seen behind the Sun.

This gives you some idea of just how huge this outburst really is! First seen in the image at 11:42, in 3 hours it has reached out 3x the diameter of the Sun - over 2.5 million miles, a speed of around 850,000mph!

The Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) is able to take images of the solar corona by blocking the light coming directly from the Sun with an occulter disk, creating an artificial eclipse within the instrument itself. The shadow crossing from the upper right corner to the center of the image is the support for the occulter disk.The position of the solar disk is indicated in the images by the white circle.
The most prominent feature of the corona are usually the coronal streamers, those nearly radial bands.
Occasionally, a coronal mass ejection can be seen being expelled away from the Sun and crossing the fields of view of the coronagraphs.

For more details, go to http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime-update.html

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