Smoke stacks were first described from ground-based observations in H-alpha.
A smoke stack or puff filament is a short-lived, small surge, up into the solar corona, without a flare to initiate it. The eruption is thin, but much longer than a spicule and follows local magnetic field lines. It only lasts a few minutes and then falls back. Smoke stacks show up best on the solar limb but can also be seen on the disc as a little spot, blue shifted by the Doppler effect as it erupts towards the telescope.
This smoke stack from STEREO showed up for just over 10 minutes in 304Å ultraviolet images. It only lasted for 2 images, taken at 5 minute intervals. The surge erupted in the north polar coronal hole and so was well away from any active region. It shot up at a slight angle, following the magnetic field lines, which are virtually linear coming out of a coronal hole.
The polar magnetic flux tubes are displayed in the near simultaneous 171Å image. Smoke-stacks are not obvious at 171Å, but a tiny, bright spike shows up at the base of the stack, showing the eruption site is extra hot. The mouse roll-over image shows this correlation.
Also visible are many spicules, which show well in polar coronal holes on 304 Angstrom ultraviolet images. The columns in the transition region dominate 304Å images, making it hard to see spicules outside coronal holes or away from the solar edge.
It seems to the author (and he is no expert) that Macro-spicules may be related to smoke stacks on the solar limb. When seen on the disc, macro-spicules are called blinkers. Macrospicules are rotating plasma and are sometimes referred to as solar tornadoes. The author does not know if blinkers (common) are always associated with a macro-spicule and advice from experts will be welcome!
The force ejecting spicules and presumably smokestacks is said to be solar sound waves escaping along magnetic conduits from the sun's interior. The sun is extremely noisy and helioseismology has found the whole huge ball of plasma rings like a bell. We are fortunate the vacuum of space does not transmit sound to earth.
Solar prominences last much longer than smokestacks and are visible to its right in this image.
The stereoscopic image below, in red/cyan anaglyph format, is a 304Å ultraviolet stereoscopic image. When the mouse runs over, it changes to 195Å.
For those with Javascript turned off, here is the 171Å image, not needing mouse roll-over.
Polar plumes: show well on 171Å images as broad columns radiating from the polar regions, usually not associated with a bright base in coronal holes. (Bright regions in coronal holes are counted as polar faculae by Belgian amateurs, but it is not clear if they are seeing the same thing in visible light as these ultraviolet images are showing.) On coronagraph images, polar plumes reach up to 40 solar radii. Beyond that the plumes seem to fuse together; but this fusion may be an illusion, since by then they are very faint and require special image brightening techniques to see them at all.
See also X-ray jets
(1 solar radius is about 700,000km)
Stereo Parallax: 1/50 from disc centre to edge (less on this cropped version, reduced in size for the web).
Movie Prepared by the STEREO team on August 3rd 2007. From the STEREO web site.