Sun in H-Alpha / CaK / White Light With Coronado 40 / Stellarvue SV80s + Lunt CaK filter or Baader Astro Solar Safety film Uploaded 11/19/11 Weekly Report For the week of November 12 - 18
Images below are 800 wide and non clickable
This week started in a huge flurry of excitement on a gigantic arch prominence on the Suns limb. It was called one of the largest in a decade, and we can only hope that this coming solar maximum will be one of the best ever! Friday, reports were coming in of a huge arching prominence starting to protrude over the oncoming western limb. Saturday was my first chance to shoot it. Totally overcast. I waited all day long and one 10 minute clear patch passed over the sun, and through thin cirrus - I got it. Not the greatest for contrast because of the thin clouds, but there is was! The clouds slammed shut and it rained. Sunday, rained all day. The reports on the web were exploding with excitement as everyone else was imaging the giant prom. I stared at dense clouds. And rain. Then, 10 minutes before sunset, the sun came out right on the horizon. I rushed out and with the PST on a tripod, tried to image the sun with a hand held Sony point and shoot camera. Not the clearest shot mind you, but there is was in all its glory!
Tuesday I went in later to work because it had totally cleared up, and I tried to get a few shots in before I left. The giant prom was GONE! It had blasted off into space and disappeared forever. But I shot a gorgeous hedgerow type prom on the limb, one of the biggest in a long time. Now that created a big sensation on the solar forum - no one else had shot this one! A gigantic filament was also on the disk of the sun, one of the longest ever recorded. It was HUGE. And I got a fairly decent shot of that one too. Finally, some white light shots showed some small but very detailed sunspots with the worsening seeing limiting the granulation details a bit. The rest of the week was quite mild by comparison. The sunspots were small, not flaring too much and no really great proms. I pull out the solar scope every day at work at break time and we look at the sunspots and prominences with the "Traveling PST" solar scope. Great fun! So now here are all the images we took this week. Hope you find them enjoyable to view.
Saturday the 12th:
The giant arch prominence, through thin clouds. Solarmax 40. Horrific seeing.
Sunday the 13th:
Sunset prom shot with PST on tripod - hand held camera. (Ive blocked out the disk in Photoshop because it was overexposed.) The prom is on the upper right. The next day, it lifted off the Sun.
Tuesday the 15th:
Here is the giant filament on the Sun with the Coronado 40mm. This is a two part montage to include the disk, which makes the shot so much more aesthetic, don't you think?
Gorgeous "Hedgerow" type prom on western limb. The detail on this one is fantastic. Here I used my new layered wavelets stacking technique to bring up the details without any deconvolution shadowing.
Here is another gorgeous prom on the other limb, like a group of bushes on fire!
Now for some white light images. This is a full disk shot with the Stellarvue 80mm with Zeiss optics made from two sub frames. It is a key to the numbers of the active regions on the sun:
Here is the unlabeled shot for a more pleasant view:
Now for the 5x Barlow close ups. All photos by the way are taken with a front filter of Baader Film. Here is AR1350, one of the groups that was flaring this week:
Here is AR1342, surrounded by a sea of granulation.
Here is AR1346, very peculiar shaped, with one side missing
The AR1342 group was spectacular on the limb, with white faculae all over:
I hope you enjoyed this weeks solar activity. Well do it again next week. Stay tuned...
