The Dutch Observatory

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

Stephen came over yesterday to do some imaging.  Well, there has never been so much astro equipment around my humble observatory.  I made several CaK images of the sun with my PST CaK and have posted the best one below.  Because of Stephen being there, I made a few H-alpha images of some prominances with his Solar Max 90.  (Great scope)  Two images in inverted H-alpha.   One of them shows a part of AR1127  (left bottom)  I might go back and reprocess them with a normal black and white sky/prom background.  I am surpirsed how good they came out.  The seeing conditions were terribel and sometimes it looked like the limb of the sun was waiving in the wind…….. Registax did a great job here!

today was Thanksgiving Day.  The clouds broke just long enough to make this image.  AR1127 has almost reached the following linm of the sun and AR1128 might have arrived.  One image with and another without the prominances.  Since the CalciumK proms are so faint I need to make the background for the proms a lot lighter.

Friday evening and Saturday evening I imaged Jupiter after a long pause.  The air has been so unstable for Jupiter  here that sometimes you could not even focus the planet.  Saturday turned out that that was also the case, but Friday was a little better.  The tail of the outbreak can be seen at the preceding limb.  Wish it was a better image, but I am glad I got this.

Today was mostly cloudy with small breaks here and there.  I was able to make two images for the mosaic but had to remove some of the clouds in the second.  Here the mosaic of today.  The clouds did not give me the opportunity to capture any proms. 

Although clouds have moved in. At 60% coverage, patience will get you a hole between them big enough for an image or two.  This image was captured when finally a large enough area cleared between two clouds.  I don’t know if the smaller prom at the following side is a remnant of yesterday’s, or if it is a new one.  Not much change since yesterday.

Another beautiful day.  It makes fun to image the sun in this weather.  I remember the summer…. too hot.  AR1124 is moving onto the backside of the sun, but 1126 and 1127 did not change much.  Some faint but nice prominances today.

Was gone for most of the day, but managed to get an image in before sunset.  I also gave it a first try to image the solar prominances in Ca-K.  The  flares were captured with very high gamma and long exposure times.  I am not sure if these flares are not bleeding in from the Ha or other lines.  I will have to test that with an Ha scope sometime.  You also can see the rotation of the sun comparing these images to the one from yesterday.

The rain and clouds moved thru and the sun was shining again.  So here an image of the Sun in Ca-K on 2010-11-17 with AR1124 at the right, 1126 in the bottom middle and AR1127 at the  left.