The Sun Today 08.19.24

The sky was clear today, and the high was 102F – the temperature during my afternoon imaging session. I tried a few different things today. The most important was to reduce the exposure time from 2.9 msec to 2 msec per video frame. I left the camera gain at 250. I think the resulting image is much better with the reduction in exposure time. There is less noise, and the detail around the sunspots is better.

I also adjusted the spacing of the second etalon to give the disk a more uniform appearance – avoiding the over-exposed and under-exposed areas that were in my prior images.

Below is the solar disk. A new group of small sunspots is emerging at the eastern limb. They should become easier to see in coming days. There is a lot of prominence activity in that limb as well. The plages around the sunspot groups are clearer in this image than in my prior images – possibly the result of the shorter exposure time and etalon tweak.

Here are the cropped images of the eastern and western limbs to emphasize the detail in the solar prominences.

The main sunspot groups visible today are AR3784 seen in the image of the Western limb above, and the following groups:

AR3784 was responsible for yesterday’s exciting auroras resulting from a coronal mass ejection (CME).

The active regions around the smaller sunspot groups have created some solar flare activity but no CMEs. The difference between solar flares and CMEs is that flares are intense flashes of Ultraviolet and X-ray (electromagnetic) energy whereas CMEs consist of solar matter – particles ejected from the sun’s corona which, when they interact with the Earth’s magnetic field and outer atmosphere, can disrupt radio signals as well as create the lovely aurora borealis.