The Dutch Observatory

The Sun is full of active regions today (Febr 28) with AR1990 growing to 250 millionths and 1991 to 280.  Today the sky was also a lot more stable so I am also showing some visible light images made with the SVC80.  Still too turbulent for the C11. Following a full disk image, close ups in Ha and finally 540nm image of the same areas.

Catching up with my images from February.   On the 27th the sun showed a large number fo active regions with the largest one being 1982 wgich produced two C class flares and one M class flare in the previous 24 hours.  Seeing was terrible so was unable to make a visible light image.  Today a full disk image with some nice filaments in the southern hemisphere and close ups of the active regions on the eastern and western limbs.

A very clear sky this morning, but the fringes of the jet stream are right above causing fast wind shears, so the seeing was very bad.  However got a decent full disk image with a very nice and long prominence at the Eastern limb and a Ha close up of AR1981,82, and 83, an area that produced today 5 C-class flares and an M-Class.  Too turbulent up there for a 1500mm whitelight with the SVC80.

The calm after the storm from Friday morning.  The seeing was good at times, and a lot better than in recent months.  Captured 4 complete IRGB series stacked and de-rotated 3 of them while the Great Red Spot was transiting the central meridian.  Each avi 3000 frames and stacked 1000 in each.

A sunny morning with temperatures in the 60s and relative stable skies.  A full disk image today and close-ups of AR1974, 76 in h-alpha and filtered visible light.  One image using the 3.8u baader visible light filter and a green filter and the second an additional continuum filter.  AR1974 can still nice be seen as it turns to the backside.  Today it shrunk from 760 to 590 millionth and did not produce a flare at all.

The sky was a bit more stable Sunday than Saturday allowing me to make some close-ups of AR1974, 76 and 80 in visible light using the Baader Continuum filter.  (Thanks Stephen for letting me borrow this).  The Ha close-ups were very weak and I’ve not included them.

The storm of the decade passed and the ice and snow has melted at the Dutch Observatory in Oxford. The sky is very unstable so today only a full disk image. I almost completely missed AR1974 because of the weather.  It has been very active today despite its size of  460 millionth, with 12 C-Class flares and 8 M-class flares.

Well, the storm of the decade was good for something, it gave me time to process my Jupiter images from last Saturday with the Ganymede transit.  This is an 11 minute capture of two RGBI series with a total of 32,000 frames of which 4,000 were stacked in AS2, sharpened in Registax 6, derotated and color combined in WinJupos and post processed in Photoshop. Not bad for the first serious derotation process attempt with some reasonable data.