The Dutch Observatory

My session today had to wait until the Sun rose above a stationary airmass including a lot of clouds. The Sun is still spotless, but a few filaments and prominences were observed.  Full disk images today as well as close ups of the center filament and a NW prom.

Average seeing today, but another spotless Sun. A few very small proms are visible at the Eastern limb as well as two filaments in the Eastern hemisphere in Ha.
BTW, I changed the animation I made of Jupiter’s GRS on my blog. I used another way of aligning the 49 images and increased the speed a bit. It now runs pretty smooth. So if you are interested in that go to my blog and look at it again.

Clear Skies, but another spotless day, with a few hours to spare until the end of the Carrington Rotation.  I observed a very small prominence at the NW limb and the filament near the Eastern limb still shows nice. Today only full disk images.

A spotless Sun today with good seeing conditions.  A nice filament is visible near the Eastern limb and the plage which is the remnant of AR2744 is approaching the Western limb.  Two reverse polarized areas are visible in the Northern hemisphere.  The largest one just North of the equator at N4.5 degrees and the smaller one at N22.14 degrees.  I made a composite of these regions which will be posted later on the ALPO Solar section website under Transitions of Solar Cycles.

Clear skies! Another spotless Sun, but today is special. Based on logging the daily reports from SWPC, today accounts for the 500th spotless day since Solar Maximum. A few faint prominences are visible at the Eastern limb as well as some faculae near the limb, as well as the plage near the Western limb.

Today no Sun images (clouds) but an animation I made of the GRS on Jupiter.  The GRS has been very active in the last few months and many observers have imaged the GRS and submitted the images to the ALPO Archive.  Using some of this data, allowed me to compose an animation of the activity between May 11 and July 20th.  I flattened each image using WinJupos’ measure and map features giving me images with uniform dimensions.  This process was followed by combining and aligning them in Photoshop and finally cropping and generating the animation.  I would like to thank Clyde Foster, Anthony Wesley, Damien Peach, Christopher Go, Mike Hood and  James Willinghan, whose images made this animation possible.
I am far from an expert on Jupiter, but looking closely will show among others, how the red material is pealed off and funneled out, how the large flakes progress, and the ”chimney” North of the GRS hollows opens.  (Click the thumbnail below to open the animated image)

This animation recalled memories of 10 years ago when I made a similar animation of the impact scar on Jupiter, showing its progression between July 19 and August 31 of 2009.

Clear Skies except for the Ha closeup for which a small cloud had to show up.  The spotless streak has ended today as the small plage just North of the equator continued to develop into a spot which was named this morning as AR2745.  This is a Cycle 24 polarized area.  However we saw a few very small reverse polarized areas, one at N23.6 and another at S30.4.   The streak ended just before we reached 500 spotless days since Solar max.  So we’re satisfied with 499 spotless days so far. In addition we observed a few proms and the filaments in the Northern hemisphere.  Today full disk images and a close up of AR2745 in Ha.

A few holes between the clouds.  Enough for full disk images of today’s Sun.  The Sun is spotless but we see again a few filaments in the NE region and the prom on the NE limb imaged by Howard yesterday is still there.

A spotless Sun today with a small faint filament near the SE limb.  Other than that the Sun is quiet. Full disk images today in the three wavelengths with the Ha image captured through some thin clouds.

I spent some time with my family from Europe as they came to visit us, so I only had time to capture some images, but not to process them.  I found the time now to do that.  So here images of two days earlier this week. A blank Sun with the exception of on the 15th when there was a faint and small filament visible near the Southern limb.