Friday 29 August 2014

C1 Flare Animation 28th August

AR12146 was very nearly on the limb of the sun, and had a beta-gamma-delta magnetic field that had potential for eruptions, in fact NASA gave a 40% chance of an M-class flare and a 5% chance of an X-class flare.  The clouds finally broke on thursday afternoon, and so I decided to train my telescope on this region, and using the autorun feature in firecapture image acquisition software and the Hutech solar guider to lock onto our star I set about recording a timelapse of our star.  Now while the larger flares didn't happen, there was a small C1 class eruption that was still the largest explosion for several light years that hurled out a large blob of plasma out into inter planetary space several times larger than Earth.  This animation shows you don't need a large or overly expensive solar scope to view these events on our sun, and was taken with a 40mm Coronado scope and Imaging Source DMK31 camera.