The Dutch Observatory

Today I had to image through holes between the clouds.  The Sun remains spotless.  A small prom could be observed on the SW limb and a filament in the NE.

Clear Skies for a nice Thanksgiving day solar session.  However, no Sun spots.  We saw an area come around the Eastern limb near the equator that showed as a small faculae in 540nm and a small plage in CaK, and showed cycle 24 polarization.  Other than that the Sun was very quiet.

Clear skies with good seeing.  The Sun remains spotless, but a few prominences around the Eastern limb made it still interesting.

The clouds cleared up, but the seeing remained poor.  One can almost expect it:  No spots today.  A few plages are visible in CaK, but it is a very quiet day on the Sun.

Another spotless day for spotless day 18 in the current streak.  Not much activity on the Sun today.  We had a small reverse polarized area pop up yesterday for a few hours, but today its gone.

Clear skies again with average seeing.  Another day with a spotless Sun. We still observe the plage in the Southern hemisphere and a filament in the NW hemisphere in Ha.

Intermittent clouds today, but I was able to get some images.  A spotless day again for spotless day 608 since solar maximum.  Solar Activity remains Very Low. We continue to see the remnant of AR2752 as a reverse polarized area.  Today’s full disk images and a close up of the mentioned area in Ha.

Well, yesterday I was notified that the Minor Planet 2000 EM20 discovered by the Catalina Survey on March 3rd 2000, has been designated as (71615) Ramakers by the International Astronomical Union. So now you can visit me not only in Oxford but also in space! Thanks to  Richard Hill for being the driving force behind this.

Clear skies with poor seeing today.  A new active area has come around the Eastern limb in the Southern hemisphere which is visible in all three full disk images.  The region was named in SWPC’s midday report as AR2752. The area also seems to be reverse polarized. In addition to his area we see a very small reverse polarized area in the NW quadrant.  A few prominences in the  SE and NW sum up todays activity.  Full disk images today as well as close ups of the new region in CaK.

The Mercury Transit 2019.

Well, it did not start good, and did not end good, but in between I was able to capture some images which were compromised by lots of clouds.  The first image that resulted in making out that Mercury was there, was at 1338 UT.  However the blotched image shows what we had to deal with.  During the second half of the transit it was not much better and resulted in only one image towards the end of the transit.  The goal was to capture images in half an hour intervals. Here six images recapping the event for 2019, which is totally different than the 2016 event, during which I was able to capture composites of the ingress and egress.