Sunday 2 October 2016

Only Plage - 2nd October

NASA was reporting a spot less disk today, and as we head towards solar minimum such days will become more and more common.  Looking at 393nm in CaK wavelengths while things are still quiet, the sun is not completely blank, with white plage - magnetic froth being visible in a number of regions on the suns disk.  These correspond to areas of magnetic activity, just not of sufficient field strength for spot formation to occur.  The seeing was not good this morning, with a near ground frost the night before and the day heating up quickly.  This was taken with the Tal100R refractor at 1000mm focal length with the home brew CaK filter and the PGR Chameleon 3 camera.