The Dutch Observatory

Most of the active sunspots have moved of the earth facing side of the sun, but there still was a lot of activity on the sun today.  Three nice prominances.  The one at the SW limb is whatever is left of the huge CME that many european imagers were able to catch. 

The prominances are still there.  Images with AR1173 and 75 inthe  H-alpha and Calcium-K emission lines.

The prominance visible yesterday are still visible today.  They seem to grow.  Also there are almost no spots left on the sun.  

Ar1169 is moving very close to the Western limb of the sun.  A very large filament can be seen in the Northern as well as southern half of the sun.

Another bright spring day.  AR1166 is moving closer to the western limb and 1172 is showing a large region of activity.  This might develop in a nice region when it moves accross the disk.  this time also an Calcium-K image made with my “Jon Wood Award” PST, and a close up of AR1166/69 showing very nicely the structure and raising of the surface.

A nice clear day today which I used to gather data to practice a new process for animation.  My buddy Michael made me aware of this.  When i first tried to run this on previous captured data i found out that processing one frame took about 20 minutes, so the process for the entire sequence ran all night! The data I captured today was cropped by a Region Of Interest and resulted in an image being prcessed in about 5 minutes.  The result below shows AR1166 at the end of a bright flare, but the images should have been adjusted for brightness.  They are too dark.  So next time better

Today we had an outreach event at a school in Norcross but before I had to leave, I made these images of the Sun.  Active regions AR1166 and 1169 are very prominant and two very nice filaments in the southern hemisphere and a few small prominances on the Northern rim.

It was supposed to be cloudy today, but this morning around 9:30 the clouds started breaking a little, allowing me to make a few runs of just about 300 frames.  Here the sun in Ha with some large real nice filaments.

The Sun in H-a and CaK on 2011-03-08 with AR1164, 65,66, and 69.  I also was able to image a one hour session from 10:12 – 11:12 EST and capture the activity around AR1166.  There is an interesting filament that reaches over from the right lower corner to the sunspot in AR1166.  In addition, several small filaments move around in the region itself.

Today was overcast with a viable thickness layer of clouds.  High clouds let the sun through to a certain extent.  When I started I saw a very nice filament at AR1164 as well as AR1166 in addition to the 5 Active Regions 1164, 65, 66, 67, 69.  However as I started imaging for an animation of the 1164 filament, clouds made the image fade in and out, so I could not continue.  But the prom is visible pretty good in both images. (Right upper quadrant).