Monday 20 January 2014

Micro-Flares - 19th January

While I observed the sun on Sunday morning I was pleasantly surprised to see the brightening of a small flare erupting away on the surface of our star.  Despite only being a small B6 class flare this was still the largest explosion that was happening at the time in at least a 4 light year radius.  The dots that are dancing around is dust on the camera sensor - time for a clean me thinks!  This animation represents a time period of about 12 minutes, which really does show how dynamic our star is!  It's the reason I like solar astronomy - the view is continually changing, something say the Orion Nebula or Andromeda galaxy never does; the closest we have is Jupiter which changes its appearance on a timescale of hours not minutes.  This animation was taken with the Coronado DS40 at f20 with the DMK31 camera.