The Dutch Observatory

It has been a while that we had a close by ISS-Moon Crossing and clear skies.  Last sunday was such a day.  The centerline was 500 mtr north of the International Horse Park Parkway in Conyers, so we setup around 23:00 in the parking lot.  The ISS was relative large at 56.4″ and was only at a distance of 490 km and the transit took only 0.55 sec.  I almost  missed the image, but was able to finish changing the disk designation for the video file one second before the transit took place.

Added my image taken on April 18th.  A very nice Sun with 5 beautiful Active Regions: AR1719,21,22,23,24 and some nice but faint prominences mostly in the Southern half of the Sun.  Flare activity limites to B a d C class flares

Broken skies today with high level clouds travelling continuously through the session.  Had to use Registax 5 in order to stack the captures. Today two very nice active region groups, AR1721,22 and AR1723 and 24 with AR1723 being most active with a B 6.0, C1.5 and a C1.3 flare.  Some small promineneces are also to be seen around the disk today.

Today a clear morning with stable skies.  I have not seen the seeing this good in a long time, and the sun does not hold back with more active regions than we have seen in a long time with 14 B and C class flares, mostly from AR1718.  Included also some closeups of Active Region 1711, because of the great seeing conditions, which has grown over the last days to a large spot.  An interesting Sun again today .

Not many clouds in the morning, but stability was not good again.  Today only a full disk image with active regions AR1704, 06, 07, 08.

Another day with medium seeing conditions.  Today three active regions and not much flare activity, but a nice prominence at the Eastern limb..

Finally after 8 days of rain, clouds and cold the sun was out today!!  Made a whole disk image and a closeup of a prominence and the surroundings of Active Region 1704.  The sun has been quiet today with only a B1.9 flare in 1702.  Waiting for more things to happen in this Carington Rotation 2135.

Frank Garner, Jim Honeycut and myself went out again to the Dove Fields at Charlie Elliott Wildlife Center to image the Comet.  This time I also brought my C11 and wanted to get a closer look at the comet.  So today I have still photo, an animation which has many gaps because I had to image on the C11 also, and a somewhat diappointing closeup taken with the C11.  This is a stack of 12 x 5 sec images. 

Catching up with the last images in Carington Rotation 2134 which were captured on 3/13 and 3/19.  The closeups let you compare nicely how the active regions 92 and 95 evolved.

This was our scheduled meeting day. Did not make it to the meeting, but to the observing session after the meeting.  First at the Dove Fields where I stayed until the comet set in the west.  We must have had two dozen visitors that wanted to see the comet. Despite some small clouds at the horizon, they all left having seen the comet through binos and a small telescope and some of them I am sure made some great pictures of the comet.  Here two images (out of 48) one taken at 8:31 the second 18 minutes later at a focal length of 250mm.