The Dutch Observatory

We just finished a 2 day outreach event for over 320 Cub Scouts and 60 parents from Fayette County at their summer camp at the Providence United Methodist Church in Fayetteville. During the 50 minute sessions, 20 dens learned how telescopes work, and got some more insight about the sun and the stereo satellites, as well as the relative distances in our solar system and other astronomy related items.  I was able to image the sun during a short break today at 11:00 AM between session.  The proms from yesterday had developed in some real nice sized proms today.  Everyone liked them!!

Imaged the sun again today.  will be doing outreach tomorrow and Thursday so no imaging than.  Today a new region is getting nicely visible at the eastern limb.  I imaged a nice closeup of it with a “Filaprom”, a filament that extends accross the limb.  Also a closeup with a 2x barlow of AR1234.

We had a lot more haze in the sky today and the result is longer exposure times as well as more detail loss.  Especially with the faint prominances at the limbs.  Having a larger aperture such as a 90 would help in better bringing out these details I expect, but my 40 mm did not bad either.  Today AR1232 is still visible and 1234 with some faint proms in H-alpha and CaK.

The Sun today.  Some of the active regions have moved to the backside of the sun and AR1232 and 1234 are visible on our side.  The prominance visible on the east limb of the sun is still there and a nice hedge prom has risen a little more south.  No closeup today (forgot to image the proms   )

Yesterday afternoon we had clouds, lighting and thunder but no rain.  The resulting humidity made for a hazy observation this morning, but still pretty good.  the prom on the east side has grown, while the prom at the western limb has disappeared.  AR1234 is becomming very visible.  Today a whole disk image as well as AR1234 and the Prom at the western limb.

Prominance activity has pickedt up again a bit today.  A nice spike on the Eastern limb and a wider prominance in the AR1228/31 area.  Today made an H-alpha and inverse image from the whole disk as well as the AR1228/31 area on the NW limb.

This morning the sun did not show any substantial activity.  A few small proms were seen but nothing like a few days ago.  I wish I could have been able to capture some of that M2 flare when it did start.  Some awesome movie clips float around on the internet that use data from SDO or Stereo.  Here my sun from this morning in H-alpha and CaK

This morning the magnetic fields above active reagions AR1226 and AR1227 became unstable and erupted.  the result was an unbelievable M2 class flare and a S2 radiations storm.  This eruption cleared out a lot of the activity that was going on at the sun the days before, so today we see the sun relative calm compared to the last days.

Here is the full disk image of the sun today.  The prominance in the animation below is on the SW limb of the sun.  Check how it has developed over the last few days, and a new prominance is coming around the corner on the SE side from the back of the sun.  We’ll keep an eye on that one.

And the prominances today were even taller than yesterday.  I decided to image an 1/2 hour animation of the SW limb.  I had imaged this one for two days, so it is a nice continuation.  It was excrutiating hot.  I felt like I had taken a hot shower with my cloths on and I could not keep the camera in my hand after I finished.  I will finish the rest of the images tonight, but here the 1/2 hour animation of the prominance at the SW limb.  Click the image and give it some time for the animated gif to load.