The Dutch Observatory

It was cold today, 18 degrees this morning and it did not get out of the 30s today with heavy winds.  But I managed to get an image to moniter the progress if the large filament from yesterday.  AR1132 and 1133 are very prominent.  Here the an CaK image showing a large hedge-row promiance where the eruption was yesterday.

Here the close up of AR1131 and AR 1133. AR1131 is very large but the sunspot is relative small.

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.

Frank and I did spend about three hours capturing the prominances on November 8th, until the sun moved behind some trees.  We should have spend more time in getting the scope properly polar aligned, but we thought that the rough alignment (which is with Franks tools already a pretty good alignment) would be sufficient to avoid disc rotation.  However it turned out that this caused a lot of problems in the final animation alignment because of the high brightness levels of the images.  I worked on this for many, many hours and for now it is good enough I guess, so here is the final result. 

Today its very windy (19 m/h +) and broken clouds, so the clouds follow each other very rapidly. Not much time to image in between.  In addition the temperature was cold at 10:00 around 38 degrees, but here is my image from today.  A hugh prominance at the south eastern limb.  AR1130 is leaving the visible side of the sun, the large one is AR1131.  AR1132 developed in the center of the sun and 1133 came from the ”backside” into view.

Early this morning we had some breaks in the clouds and I made use of that by getting another image of the Sun.  AR1131 becomes more visible and seems to have a pretty good size sunspot while 1130 starts moving furher away.

Today’s sky conditions were a lot better than the day before.  Today AR1131 started to turn more in view on the preceding limb while 1130 moved further to the west.  I also made an image of AR1130 and 31 each using a 2x barlow.  These images are through a Calcium-K filter which is in the blue spectrum and as such a lot less dramatic than the orangy-red of H-alpha. 

High winds caused a lot of disturbance in the atmosphere for Social Circle, so the seeing was around 1/5.  However, I still made an image of the sun as AR1130 moves further to the western limb of the sun and 1131 just starts to become visible on the eastern side.  The quality of the image reflects the seeing conditions and the prominances are blurry also.

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.

Here the reprocessed images from before.  I believe I like this representation better