The Dutch Observatory

Variable clouds today, so not much room for imaging, but earlier it was not too bad and I made this image.  At the spot where a few days ago we had the large prominance, now some high prominances with interesting tops.  The structure of 1133 is nicely visible here.

Yesterday was cloudy and windy and the sun knew to stay away from that :-)   So no solar image from here from yesterday.  Today a little better and the sun showed though a few times.  The large prominances which were there earlier in the week are gone and a few spikes show up instead.  I like the stucture of AR1133.

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.

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.

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.