Monday 22 May 2017

Sunspot Genesis - 21st May

It was very clear when I setup and observed on Sunday morning that there was an emerging flux region.  This near Earth sized maelstrom of turbulent plasma is a region where magnetic field lines are breaking through the chromosphere as sunspots form.  Indeed, looking at the CaK disk full size it is possible to see a bipolar pair of sunspots.  They are not visible in this image as sunspots are features of the photosphere, and this image shows the chromosphere.  Taken with the 0.2m Airylab HaT at ~4250mm focal length with a double stacked Daystar Quark, a Baader solar telecompressor to give a 0.75x reduction factor, and a PGR Chameleon 3 camera using 2x2 binning to give 6.9um effective pixels and a short 2ms exposure time in an attempt to freeze the best moments of seeing.