The Dutch Observatory

The sun on thanksgiving day. Very cold and very unstable skies. Tried to make WL close ups with the C11 but too much turbulence up there….

Thanksgiving morning.  It was the coldest morning thus far with 19 degrees but the sky seemed clear.  However the seeing was far from good.  However, since I got up I made a few runs.  Here the best one with the GRS.  Can’t wait for conditions to change.

A very cold morning with high thin clouds moving through.  A full disk image today with an Ha close up of the prominences at the Western limb a little north of AR1899.  A levitating and hedgerow prom with nice activity around it and AR1899 showing the Wilson effect.

Relative clear skies today, but jet stream did not cooperate for close ups.  Today a full solar disk image with 8 active regions. This will be my last image during this Carington Rotation.

Got up early this morning to attempt to image ISON.  However did not see the comet.  It was probably still in the trees behind my neighbor’s house.  So instead, I started imaging Jupiter.  Here another Jupiter IRGB image in less than average seeing.

Today we have 9 active regions!  And look at the size of them.  It is becoming more and more difficult to get any visible light clear frames from the sun spot close ups. The sun is getting very low and the jet stream does not help.  Tried very hard today, but no success.  The Ha images today have been taken with the DMKs and the SolarMax40.

Thursday the 14th, the jet stream gave us a small break and I took advantage of the brief time that the seeing was a little better.  Some images today of the major sunspot regions in visible light as well as  H-alpha.  Some of the close ups are in full resolution, others have been captured in 640×480.  AR1897 is still very big and active at over 600 millionth.

The seeing a little better and was able to capture one half way decent visible light close up.  Also caught AR1897 in the act when it released an M 1.4 flare while it has grown very rapidly to over 600 millionth in size. 

Another day where the seeing is not good enough to capture visible light close ups of the sunspots, so I made some comparison images between the ASI120MM and the DMKs.  The top two images with the ASI120MM the next two with the DMK41AU02.AS.  The first two close ups with the ASI120MM the last one with the DMK21AU04.AS.  You be the judge which you feel are more detailed.

The largest sunspot in AR1890 has broken up in two and the active region is rapidly decaying and is now less than half the size of what it was a few days ago.  Here an H-alpha image of the still large region, as well as an image of the new regions coming around at the eastern limb, AR1893, 96 and 97.