The daytime sky has been cloudy for at least a week now. We got perhaps 2.5-3″ of rain those days, and it was welcome. Of course, there was no solar observation let alone photography during those cloudy days. Sigh, so it goes.
Today, the sky was partly cloudy with a few breaks in the clouds lasting up to an hour. So, I dragged my still newish Solar rig out onto the front deck to see what we might see.
The solar telescope has four levels of focus-adjustment to control the image. There’s the standard eyepiece/camera focus. Then there is the leading optical train external filter that can be adjusted to eliminate multiple images, then there is a focus adjustment for each Etalon filter. These are adjusted in the order described above.
The sun was very active today – lots of prominences and filaments (prominences seen head-on rather than edge-on), plages (very hot areas in the solar chromosphere associated with strong magnetic fields) and sunspots. Stacking the best 20% of ~600 frames from an AVI, the disk looked like this:
The bright white features on the solar disk are the plages. The black dots interspersed among the plages are sunspots that appear dark because they are cooler than the surrounding solar gases. Prominences appear all along the edge of the solar disk, but they are most evident from the 12 o’clock to 3 o’clock positions along the disk’s edge. Magnified, they look like this:
It’s an exciting year in the 11-year solar cycle, and I feel very lucky to witness it and share it with you here.