The atmosphere was a bit more turbulent than usual today; a cold front moved in late yesterday and today was cool and partly cloudy. Nonetheless, I did my best to catch up on solar imaging. The preceding week, I did no solar photography for reasons totally unrelated to weather.
Below, you can see that the most striking feature in today’s H-alpha image is a massive loop prominence along the sun’s SE limb. There are bright plages around the major active regions, and also some scattered filaments.
With the telescope’s filters tuned to emphasize the active regions, we see four large sunspot groups. There is an additional, albeit small and faint active region, AR4016 that lies between AR4018 and AR4012, not visible in my image below.
The cropped images in the gallery below showcase the prominences.
Neat!