The Dutch Observatory

Crisp but clear skies.  Seeing at 8/10.  Today marks the end of Carrington Rotation 2173 and the beginning of CR2174 starting at 04:08 UT.   The activity on the Sun today is Medium with 17 C-class flares in the last two days.  Four active regions make up for a total of 300 millionths, which is up 40 since yesterday.  Total spot count is at 20.  Today three full disk images and close ups of AR2501, 02 and 03.

A cold morning with clear skies, but poor seeing at 6/10. Quinten came over to take a look at my setup, and to look at the different ways you can look at the Sun.  The solar activity is Medium with two M-class flares and 8 C-class flares.  Instead of further declining, AR2497 has perked up a bit to 250 millionths again, and has even  produced the two M-Class flares.  I was fortunately enough to see one of them and capture the end of the M-1.8 flare in both Ha and CaK.  Today the Sun shows 5 active regions with a total area of 290 millionths.  The spot count for today went down to 24.  Today again, three full disk images as well as close ups of AR2497 showing the flare in Ha and CaK.

I used the close ups captured today to show how they relate to each other.  Click the image to see the animation of how AR2297 looks at 5 different focal length through the SM40. It starts with the full disk size and ends with the Klee 3x barlow. The intermediate images are made using the Meade 140 2x barlow with out extension tube, with a 1/4″ extension and a 1″ extension tube.

After a few days of clouds and a little rain, a few hours of broken skies with so-so seeing until the clouds are back again.  The sun has been real active with 4 M and 17 C-class flares in the last 48 hours.  The Sun spots in AR2297 have increased from 19 to 32 since yesterday and the area now occupies 280 millionth today.  Its nice to see this guy is really active
Today a full disk image and two closer views of AR2297 and the area around it with some nice filaments.

The Sun is getting quieter by the day now.    AR2266 is the largest active region at only 130 millionth, and produced only 1 C-class flare in the last 24 hours.

The Sun is full of active regions today (Febr 28) with AR1990 growing to 250 millionths and 1991 to 280.  Today the sky was also a lot more stable so I am also showing some visible light images made with the SVC80.  Still too turbulent for the C11. Following a full disk image, close ups in Ha and finally 540nm image of the same areas.

Spend some time with Marie Lott imaging the Sun last Friday using different filters.  However the seeing was terrible, so it does not look like our effort paid off. All captured images seem to be washed out.  Except for the full disk image, which was taken the usually way with the SolarMax40 and a Meade 140, 2x barlow.  Today we have AR1948, 49, 50, 51, 52,  53, 54, and 55.

When I setup to observe the sun this morning I saw this huge prominence lifting off.  I could not setup fast enough to start imaging the fast eruption.  Twenty minutes later it was getting pretty dim and noisy  for my camera and scope, so I stopped.  I have problems with the transfer of my YouTube caccount to Google, so could  not post it there.  Ended up making an animated gif and put it in my blog.  Click here to link to the animation.

Today it was a difficult sky, high clouds and washed out con-trails, but despite this, I managed to image a nice class C3.0 solar flare erupting from 1670. The sequence I captured between the clouds, showed how following the eruption, a nice plasma cloud formed and swiped across the region and blocked the view of the active region below it. The time between the first (upper left) and last image (bottom right) was 15 minutes

Yesterday’s double prominence was reduced today to a single, but still very impressive.  In addition the active regions still look very nice and especially 1596 shows a lot of activity.