The Dutch Observatory

Another observing session from the Dove Fields at CE. We had 13 people on the field. Five visitors who were there also on Sunday at Lake Varner, and Kitty made a very nice closeup of the comet.  I tried to do too much by bringing my SVC80 and trying to capture the comet through Frank’s refractor.  Could not get the comet on the chip of the DMK or maybe bring it in focus, so I lacked the time to keep track of my Canon.  Therefore limiting today to only one image and waiting for another chance.

After a rainy evening on Monday, we went to Charlie Elliott’s Dove Fields.  This place has a 1.5 degree horizon and is an ideal place for watching the Comet.  We had 6 CE members showing up.  First we located the moon and from there it was a snap to find the comet.  Everyone saw it through binos and even through Marilyn Edwards Dob.  A great evening.  Here my image of tonight and an animation of the moon and the comet setting in the west. Click the image for the larger version and the animation.

I made around 60 images of the comet, however, only 8 or 9 turned out to be usable for a time lapse.  The rest did not show the comet, or it was blurred and would have distracted more than contribute.  Here a link to the timelapse in my gallery.

We have been hunting the comet C/2011 L4 for three days now.  I caught it on my camera two days ago, but did not have my remote with me resulting in the image being exposed to cross movement.  Tonight I had the remote with me and here one of the images I took tonight.

Adding today the images captured on 2013-03-08 and 10. A large number of Active Regions, showing an active Sun but not very active prominences..

Picking up activity, the number of active regions and sunspots has increased a lot.  Today Active Regions 1681,82,83,84,85,86,87, and 88.

A nice Sun today, not very busy, but still a nice filament and a few crackles in active regions AR1673,75,76 and 78. 

My last full disk images of the Sun in Carington Rotation 2133  The images were taken on February 20 and 21. The seeing was quite terrible on both days but the images came out not quite as bad as I thought it would be.  

Today it was a difficult sky, high clouds and washed out con-trails, but despite this, I managed to image a nice class C3.0 solar flare erupting from 1670. The sequence I captured between the clouds, showed how following the eruption, a nice plasma cloud formed and swiped across the region and blocked the view of the active region below it. The time between the first (upper left) and last image (bottom right) was 15 minutes

The Sun was out today, but many clouds and con-trails kept tracking through the field of view and impacting the capture quality.  The sun has taken up on activity with a number of active regions and sunspots.  Today a full disk image showing the very nice filament in the SE quadrant.  Also closeups of AR1671, 73 and 75.