It's interesting to see the ones with a downward component to the blooming. That's less common. "Blooming" tends to be mostly horizontal due to the physical geometry of SOHO's CCD imagers. (But it's not unheard of for this to occur in other directions. Just more common for it to be left-right.) There's some interesting physics behind this; if a pixels is oversaturated, electrons will literally spill over into adjacent pixels, causing those pixels to be read by the camera's computer as detecting light when in fact they're just being energized by their over-saturated neighbors.<br /><br />If you have a digital camera, you can duplicate the effect yourself by finding a bright light source and aiming the camera at it. It'll show best with artificial light sources in a dark room -- Christmas lights on a tree in a dark living room may produce the effect, depending on your camera. I've noticed it most when taking pictures with bright lights in a dark room. My camera gets mostly top-down spillage. In extreme situations, I get streaks all the way across the image! <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em> -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>