The Dutch Observatory

A nice Sun today, not very busy, but still a nice filament and a few crackles in active regions AR1673,75,76 and 78. 

My last full disk images of the Sun in Carington Rotation 2133  The images were taken on February 20 and 21. The seeing was quite terrible on both days but the images came out not quite as bad as I thought it would be.  

Today it was a difficult sky, high clouds and washed out con-trails, but despite this, I managed to image a nice class C3.0 solar flare erupting from 1670. The sequence I captured between the clouds, showed how following the eruption, a nice plasma cloud formed and swiped across the region and blocked the view of the active region below it. The time between the first (upper left) and last image (bottom right) was 15 minutes

The Sun was out today, but many clouds and con-trails kept tracking through the field of view and impacting the capture quality.  The sun has taken up on activity with a number of active regions and sunspots.  Today a full disk image showing the very nice filament in the SE quadrant.  Also closeups of AR1671, 73 and 75.

Today conditions were not good at all with high winds and terrible seeing. However, of the images captured a few were OK. So here a full disk image and a closeup of an M1.9 flare in AR1672. No images today with the C11.

A beautiful day today giving me time to image the sun in different ways.  Seeing was a lot better than last time and was around 6/10 .  Two sunspots AR1670 and 71with little flare activity.  Today, a full disk image of the Sun, a beautiful filaprom, and some closeups of AR1671 made with the SM40 and the Celestron C11 with the Baader photographic filter, enhanced with  double stacked Ha filters (Lumicon and Orion) at the camera and a green filter.

Saturday February 9th.  Finally a sunny day again.  We did experiment with the SolarMax 40, the SV80 and the Orion 90mm and various filters.  The sky was very turbulent.  Seeing probably 3 or 4 out of 10.  The Orion’s focal lenght was too long for the conditions to result any usable images, However the rest was kind of OK.  See the caption on each image for capture details.

Another day of experimenting with my new filter.  Today a full disk image of the Sun, a closeup of  AR1665, 67 and 68 using the SM40, A closeup of 1665, and finally a closeup of AR1665 using the C11 with the Baader 3.8 filter and an Orion gree RGB filter.

I did experiment with my new Baader filter made from 3.8u Solar film.  This film lets much more light through than the normal 5.0u film used for observing.  This allows additional filters to be used behind the whitelight filter.  I ran a whole series of tests and put this composite together of the best images in each case.  The four images shown were made with:  90mm Orion Refractor and a Lunt wedge, a 90mm Orion Refractor with a 40mm Lunt single stacked Ha etalon, a Celestron C11 with the Baader 3.8 filter and an Orion Red RGB filter.  the final image in the group is made with the Celestron C11, the Baader 3.8 film and a green RGB filter. The single image is made with the Lunt 40mm etalon and a blocking filter on the Orion refractor.

A new Carington Rotation started on the 25th, so I am late posting the images captured on January 31.  Conditions weere not good so today only a whole disk capture.