September 12th

Sorry for the delay in getting some images up, I was away for most of august so not many flicks from that month i'm afraid. I've put up my backlog, but without commentary or else i'll never get things posted! Anyway, back to the present...

First off a full disk in Ha, taken with the DS40 @f16 with the PL130M. Was a nice view today with the north western quadrant having a good smittering of filaments, to the east of the meridian an area of churned surface centred with a long thin filament. On the NE limb a bright area has come over where some observers managed to image some spots there. There were a few other small, bright areas on the disk in Ha. AR1106 stole the show though and I suspect we're going to see some very photogenic shots of it in the coming days. Prom wise there was nothing huge, but each quadrant had a main area of proms which were interesting in there own rights.

CaK wise things were interesting too - the norther hemisphere has a band of bright plage stretching from limb to limb, with the area of new spots in the NE fairly bright. AR1106 is glaringly obvious, easy even visually in the CaK PST for me. I'm currently 'doing some work' on the CaK PST, for some time now i've been concious that something is not quite right with the focus - removing the cover on the black box has revealed that the penta prism used for focussing is out of alignment, i've briefly had a mess about with this, with some improvement, however a final tweak is needed and this is a job for a cloudy day / night.

I've been getting into 'one shots' of late - these are shots where the disk and prominences are captured in one shot, as opposed to taking an exposure for each feature and then combining the 2 images into one in post processing. As I gradually learn more features in CS4 i'm prefering this method for capturing images as I feel it gives a view that is more like what is seen at the eyepiece - it seems more natural and less processed to me.

After the overviews it was time for me to take a peek at the areas that in my eyes were the most interesting. These are all 'one shots' taken with the DS40 @f19 with the DMK31. There was a lovely filaprom on the NW limb, with a hedgerow prom just above it. I'm sure as the the quiescent proms that are plentiful in this hemisphere get closer to the limb there will be a few more filaproms in the days ahead. A small bright area is also visible towards the bottom centre of the image.

Swinging round to the NE limb there was a beauty of a prom visible, like a big dancing flame. It was showing signs of being filapromesque. Also visible close to the limb was a bright area, which I hereby name 'Brian' following his dicovery of pores/spots there earlier. Towards the bottom right of the image the whole of the solar surface is really churned up, reminds me of grass fields blowing in the wind - central of this area is that long thin filament...

My favourite image from today is the next one of AR1106, it's a big swirling. churning chunk of sun. I just love the way those 2 big horns of plasma are poking out. Definitely looks like it has a big 'S' shaped filament that is going to come into view. I have a feeling there is going to be some beaut shots of it in the days to come. I though this migh be the worst of my images today as clouds were starting to bubble up and blow in when I got this avi, but I think it's turned out ok!

Hope you like these pics! Weather forecast isn't too clever now for the week so not optimistic of being able to get more views in - autumn is well an truly here in the UK now!