The Dutch Observatory

A very interesting sun.  Active Regions 1242 and 43 are very pronounced today.  A lot of proms including a nice very tall but faint prom at the Western limb and a hedge row at the NW limb.  The row of individual proms seems to be duplicated by a row of filaments paralell to the proms on the surface of the Sun.  

The sun showed some nice activity today, especialy AR1242.  We also had some real nice prominances, but I had to cut my session short for an outreach program at Charlie Elliott.  The prominances extended even more during the solar outreach and i just wish, I could have captured it.

Today the sunspots in AR1240 and 41 are disappearing, but some new sunspots are emerging.  Today a full sun image and a close up of active region AR1240.

AR1236 is at the western limb of the Sun and will disappear from our viewand while AR1240 and 41 do not show much activity when I took a look this morning.  Today, a closeup of the disappearing AR1236, and the active regions 1240 and 41 as well as an Calcium K image.

Went first to Charlie Elliott for a work session at the Jon Wood Field, so I had a late start to image.  Today active regions 1240 and 41 while AR1236 is getting ready to turn to the backside of the sun.  Also an image with two seperate prominances, one from the eastern limb, the second of the SW limb..

This morning everything was clouded over until it gave way to a medium sized cover of transparent clouds.  Today a lot of the detail is lost in the bad seeing conditions, but at least I got an image of the sun today.  Could not make out if the light bridge in the sunspot in AR1236 was still there.  Can’t see it in the image either, but that could be the clouds

Today temps were going to be close to 100 degrees so I started my imaging session as soon as the sun was above the tree tops.  Today AR1236 is still bridged, but it seems that the bridge has moved to the south and is only visible in my scopes in the inverted H-alpha image.  I tried CaK also, but could not make out the bridge.  Stephen Ramsden called me and said he could make it out in whitelight in his 127 mm scope with a 4x barlow so am waiting for his images.  Here my images of today.

A clear Sky again today and the sun shows some nice prominances and filaments.  Three active regions AR1234, 36 and 37.  AR1236 is still bridged but the second bridge which was visible yesterday is now gone.  The bridge can nicely be seen in the inverted image in which the sunspot shows white and the bridge is dark.

Yesterday I had an outreach event at the Arts and Science Workshops organized by Life Labs at the Norcross Highschool.  It was cloudy almost all day, so no image of the 18th, but today I imaged the sun again.  When I noticed that the main sunspot in active regsion 1236 was bridged, I made also a closeup of the region.  Surpringly it turned out that the spot was double bridged which is very much evidenced in the inverted image below.  Will keep looking for this spot tomorrow to see if it stays intact or if it will break up.

We just finished a 2 day outreach event for over 320 Cub Scouts and 60 parents from Fayette County at their summer camp at the Providence United Methodist Church in Fayetteville. During the 50 minute sessions, 20 dens learned how telescopes work, and got some more insight about the sun and the stereo satellites, as well as the relative distances in our solar system and other astronomy related items.  I was able to image the sun during a short break today at 11:00 AM between session.  The proms from yesterday had developed in some real nice sized proms today.  Everyone liked them!!