The Dutch Observatory

No large prominences at the rim, but the active regions 1260 and 61 are crackling with C-flares.  Will get very interesting in the next few days.

The proms visible at the Western rim two days ago have turned to the backside of the sun.  Today only some small prominences were visible.  However AR1260 is developing very nicely and has a very nice structure, so I am including a closeup of it both normal processed and inverted brightness.

Temperatures still high (93).  But skies are a little better today.  Today I imaged a whole disk and close up of AR1254 with some real nice prominences and AR1259.  Both closeups are presented in normal and inverted brightness processing.

Lots of puffy clouds this afternoon, but this morning a period of relative nice conditions.  A full disk image today with AR1251, 54,and 59 and some nice prominences.  In addition a closeup of Active Region 1254 with the two prominences at the SW limb.

Thursday the sky was covered with streaking clouds.  In fact I could not process my images in Registax 6 because it would misalign along the streaks, so used Registax 5.  The clouds were to bad even to try to image the prominence background.  So today a normal and inverted image of the surface of the sun only with a neutrual background, showing AR1251, 54 and 59.

My image of the ISS/Atlantis transit of the sun of last Thursday, made it  in the local news paper two days ago.  The Covington News had a small article about the transit in its Wednesday edition. Click here for the article.

Today’s sun shows a nice number of active regions AR1250, 51, 54, 56,57,58 and 59 as seen on the whole disk image and some nice prominences at the SW limb.  I also made a closeup of AR1254 which shows a nice group of sunspots and a nice filaments streching North.

Did image later today, just before the sun disappeared behind the trees to the west.  Four nice sunspot groups AR1250, 51, 54 and 56, while another soon might be named.  In addition to the whole sun image, I also made a closup of Active Region 1251.  From the inverted image, one can nicely see that the sunspot has a light bridge.  (One of the reasons I like to include inverted light images).

After two days of cloudy conditions, today the sun was out in the morning.  Interrupted by some clouds which covered most of the sky in the afternoon.  However that was after I got my image today.  A lot has changed since the transit on Thursday.  Four active regions, AR1250, 51, 54 and 56. also a nice prominance at the SE limb. 

Atlantis Goodby!! Frank Garner, Stephen Ramsden, his frien Eric, and I got together to attempt to image the last chance for a solar transit of the ISS with the shuttle Atlantis from our area. A layer of “thin” clouds brought the “astronomical seeing” down to poor. Had to turn up the gamma and the gain way above my normal settings to get a reasonable shutterspeed for a transit image. Here my result. Not  great, but good enough to say “Goodby to Atlantis”.