The Dutch Observatory

It was cloudy early today, but the clouds broke around 9:30 and I made my usual solar image(s).  AR1161 and 62 are getting ready to move to the backside of the sun and some new filaments are showing at the eastern side.

The last few days I have made two animations of the Active Region 1161.  click on the links to link to the activation and see how the filaments lurch out of the region.  The colored version is a 30 minute animation the b/w is one hour of activity.

Another Sunny day with a few clouds moving through.  AR1158 is approaching the western linb of the sun, while AR1161 is full of activity and even expanding  with another sunspot region AR1162.  Some activity can be seen at the Eastern limb.  Here the Ha and CaK images of today

When the fog burned off it was nice and clear for a while.  Today I was testing the SolarMax40 with the correct blockong filter.  I was pleasantly surprised.  The detail looked at least as good as the LS35 and in addition, it was a lot easier to focus with a helical focusser, which does not turn the camera also as does the LS35.  So here the images of today.

today a lot of puffy clouds kept chasing through the sky making it hard to image, so I mainly used the Lunt LS35 today.  Here a whole disk image and a close up of AR1161.

OK, I’ve been very busy testing several Solar Scopes, so have fallen behind in posting my images.  Around Christmas I tried to work with the Lunt LS50 etalons, but had problems with my scope, so I don’t really know what they do.  The last week I looked at the following scopes:  Lunt LS35, Lunt60 with pressure tuning,  and the SolarMax40.  The first images of the SolarMax were terrible.  It looked they would not come in focus.  It turned out that the blocking filter was wrong.  Changing this to a B10 changed the playing field.  The Lunt LS35 turned out great for the money.  Its sweet spot was a little bit out of the center, but I got great images with it, and I would have bought this scope if we had not detected the wrong blocking filter with the SolarMax.  For the price/performance of  the LS35 you cannot beat this deal.  However, once the correct blocking filter was installed on the SolarMax, this scope became my favorite, simply because I had the opportunity to buy it used.  If I had to pay the new price, my choice would have been the LS35!  Here a number of the images made on the 16th.

A friend of mine made me aware of some images of me that were published in the Netherlands in “de Volkskrant”.  This is a major national newspaper in the Netherlands.  It is great that people all over the world get to see what we do here.  It makes me fell good to be a little part of that outreach. Dank je wel Ria.

http://www.vkblog.nl/bericht/351325/ISS_vliegt_langs_Venus

We reached out to the 4th grade students from Ficquett again.  Today to let them look at the Sun and to give them a feel for the relative size and distances in the Solar system. But before I took off made an image of the sun.  Not much development of new activities.  Here a normal processed image as well as with inverted disk.

After a week of cold, rain, and clouds, finally a sunny day again.  A nice image with a few prominances.  Nothing spectacular, but a nice update of the activity on the sun with AR1152 and 53 both processed normally, as well as a light inverted solar disk image.

Because of the forecast I thought I would not be able to image today, however it turned out different.  Here an image from before it started clouding over again.