Fiery eruptions on Earth and in space caught on camera

GWEN IFILL:

Now, to our NewsHour Shares of the day.

Two balls of fire caught our eye that might be of interest to you, too. A fiery explosion sent molten lava, rocks and gas flying almost 300 feet into the air on Sunday on Hawaii's Kilauea volcano. It was triggered by the partial collapse of a crater wall. A section of the wall had broken off and splashed into a lava lake. That bubbling lake rose to a record-high level last week. It sits in a crater within a crater. The area around the volcano has been closed off to visitors since 2008, and no one was injured.

And out beyond where any human life exists, eruptions of a different sort. The sun is home to the largest explosions in the solar system. A NASA observatory team captured these wing-like flares from solar eruptions over a six-hour period last month. Yesterday, it released images showing a massive eruption of solar filament, snake-like, unstable bursts of plasma spanning millions of miles.

So darn cool.

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See the images here and here.