The Dutch Observatory

Thin Cirrus Clouds this morning with some holes here or there.  Seeing 7/10.  Solar activity is Low today with 1 C-class flare in the last two days.  AR2546 has decreased in size again, now to 460 millionths, and the Wilson effect is nicely visible especially in the Ha close up.  Only three Sunspots today…..  Three full disk images as well as close ups of AR2546.  I also took the C11 out for a close up of AR2546, but the transparency did not work with me.

Sunny skies with seeing at 7/10.  Solar activity is Very Low again with no flares in the last two days.  Active region AR2546 is the only one left and while starting to get smaller, it still looks very interesting. AR2546 is today at 480 millionths which is also the total active region area for the Sun.  The number of Sunspots today is only 5.  Full disk images today with close ups of AR2546 in the three wavelengths.

Wow, clear skies for a change.  The Sun’s activity is Low with 1 C-class flare in the last two days.  AR2546 has been floating around an area of 450-500 millionths and today increased to 550, the highest it has been, and which is the total Solar Area for today.  Total Sunspots down from 9 to 7.   Today full disk images in the three wavelengths as well as close ups of AR2546.

High Cirrus clouds this morning.  Seeing 6/10.  Well, AR2546 came around the corner two days ago and has grown to 410 millionths, but the Solar flare activity is coming from AR2544.  In the last two days we have seen 12 C-class flares, 10 of which came from AR2544, 2 from AR2543, and 0 from AR2546.  The area is still classified as an H region, but has two spots in the meantime. Total Active Region area for the 5 regions today is 770 millionths with 27 sunspots.  Full disk images today as well as close-ups of the regions.

Caught in the act!!  Clear skies this morning and started my session as usual with WL.  When I switched to Ha, nothing indicated what would follow.  The full disk image was uneventful but after I changed to close ups and finished AR2544, I saw an outburst in AR2543.  This was a very fast C5.6 flare which lasted only 7 minutes total.  However, I got the peak and several images following it of which I am showing 2.  The Sun has becoming much more active over night and has only today already produced 4 C-class flares so the activity is official Medium.  Also a new Region has shown up at the Eastern limb which is very sizable  (AR2546?).  So maybe we are in for some nice activity in the days to come.

Another Sunny day with relative good seeing 8/10.  Solar activity today is Very Low again.  In fact the last C-class flare was 6 days ago and the largest Flare since then a B 9.4 on the 9th. We have 4 Active Regions, AR2542, 43, 44, and 45, with the largest region still being AR2542 and increasing today by 20 to 160 millionths, and a Dai on the McIntosh scale.  Total region area is 350 millionths and total sunspot count is 27.  Today again full disk images in Ha, CaK and WL/540nm with close ups of the mentioned regions.

Clear Skies again. Solar activity is Very Low with no flares in the last two days. We have four regions with a total area of 270 millionths. the four regions support a total of 30 Sun Spots and the largest area is still AR2542. Today my usual three full disk images and close ups in the different wavelengths.

Well, I did submit the images, data and calculations for the Planetary Transit Special Award.  The pictures show the over 2 foot picture of the composite images of the Sun and a close up showing the parallax between the two sites.  The idea is to calculate the distance between the Sun and Earth ( 1 AU) using this information.  I believe I did not bad, so we’ll wait and see what the coordinator of this program says.

I also have uploaded a composite of 10 images showing the ingress and 9 images showing egress, which were timed the same way. Based on my measurements, I saw the ingress about 2.5 minutes later than the times identified in publications which referred to the times related to the center of Earth.

Some initial images of the Mercury Transit from yesterday.  For those interested in calculating the AU. I have uploaded full disk images in the solar archive which were taken at the following times: 1530:30, 1600:00, 1630:00, 1700:00; 1730:30 and 1800:01 UT. The time was exactly at the time identified (Full hour and half an hour) and was synchronized with the official US time http://time.gov . In addition, the location from where the images were taken is identified on the images.