The Dutch Observatory

Did solar today at Charlie Elliott, so made these images after we were done.  A very nice prominance at the SW limb and a closeup of AR1325,30 and 32.

It was solid clouds this morning, but around noon it started to clear a bit. However there were clouds everywhere. The two different wind directions were still there, which made it hard to knwo when to be ready for an image. I have included today a movie clip of what I am talking about. You can see the two different layers moving in different directions. I processed the data which I captured in Registax5 since version 6 had problems with the moving clouds. Today a whole disk image only with active regions AR1289,94,95,96,98 and 99.

   Movie of bi-directional clouds of yesterday and today

Back from a two week vacation trip to visit relatives in upstate NY.  The weather was terrible.  More than half the days were cloudy and rainy with the nights dropping in the low 60s, high 50s.  But worst of all, I did not have access to the internet.  But we’re back and I will update my sites soon with the images I was able to take.  Also while we were there, I did attend the August meeting of the Mohawk Valley Astronomical Society which was held in Hamilton N.Y. at Colgate University. I could not believe it as I met a  very active member of MVAS, Carol Higgins, who I worked with 35 years ago.  This was a surprise and it was great to meet her again!!

The program included a guided tour through Colgate’s museum of Minerals and Gemstones.  I used to facet gemstones, so this was a double goody for me.  We also learnd about the dinosaur eggs on display in the museum.  Than on to the planetarium where weekly shows are available for Colgate’s visitors.  Joe and Tom, both members of MVAS and working at Colgate gave us a personalized overview of the capabilties of their planetarium and showed several works in progress of the productions of the students at the university.  The planetary show finished with the screening of “The Violent Universe”, a presentation about everything that can go wrong in the Universe that and might lead to the end of our existence on Earth.  A dozen of us than joined Tom to pay a visit to Colgate’s Observatory “The Foggy Bottom”.  Tom explained how the name came about and then it went up in the tower.  The clouds were scattered and we had a 4 day moon in the sky, lighting up everything around us, so the moon became our target.  It was nice to witness the occultation of a star by the dark side of the moon.  Some of us saw the star, others not any more.  A real great evening.  Thank you Mohawk Valley Astronomical Society and Colgate University.

This morning the sky was covered with thin puffy transparent clouds before the storms rolled in and I was surprised how much detail of the sun was visible.  In planetary imaging I would have had to quit.  The region at the SE limb, which is not named yet, shows yesterday’s prom as a nice filament today.  For the rest there was not much prom activity today. 

The last few days I have made two animations of the Active Region 1161.  click on the links to link to the activation and see how the filaments lurch out of the region.  The colored version is a 30 minute animation the b/w is one hour of activity.

The sky cleared for an hour early in the morning today and than clouded over again.  I decided to make closeup of AR1131 and 1133 and the structure of the umbra and penumbra can be seen quite nicely. In order to show this better I have included a normal version and an inverted verion of it.   I also observed a few good sized but relative faint prominances and a few smaller ones. 

I wanted to image the large prominance  also in Halpha today.  Went to Frank’s to image the sun in Ha.  Coming back home I made several other runs in Calcium-K.  Here the Halpha and CaK images.  I was surprised seeing so much of the prominance in CaK.

My origin is in the Netherlands.  Today they celebrate Sinterklaas in the Netherlands and it is custom that presents are being given to family members.  I sent a T-Shirt with the image of the ISS-Sun transit which was used on this year’s Peach State Star Gaze shirt to my niece’s partner Martin, who is also an amateur astronomer.  He was really surprised to receive this package from the Peach State!  Here Martin in his Peach State T-Shirt.  He can truely say that he is the only one in the Netherlands or maybe in Europe who has a shirt like this.

The forecast for the next two days does not look good, but I got my share of the photons this morning and used some of them to make these images of the sun.  A new sunspot seems to be forming.  Its structure can be seen a little more detailed in the second image left of center, which is my first solar image using a Meade 140 2x barlow on a short snout for the camera so I can reach focus.

Frank and I did image the Sun again today.  However, the Ha imaging got cut short because the light clouds became too much.  This gave opportunity to make a nice image of the sun with some atmospheric phenomenan (see the next blog).  Here the CaK  image with AR1120 .