Sunday 4 December 2016

Ha Full Disk - 4th December

The sun really is low now as we're only just over 2 weeks away from the winter solstice, where, for observers in the northern hemisphere the sun is at it's lowest in the sky.  From that point onward the sun climbs higher and higher in the sky with each passing day.  I'm severely limited at this time of year with the low sun and it being blocked by the urban skyline of trees and rooftops, but luckily was able to find a gap to observe just after midday.  Considering we are heading towards solar minimum there was plenty of nice activity including nice prominences and filaments, but also in the form of largish AE12615 which has been crackling away with minor B and C class flare activity since it rounded the limb a week or so ago.  This image was taken with the PST double stacked with a Lunt 50 etalon, and with a barlow to take the focal length to ~500mm it nicely filled the frame of the PGR Chameleon 3 camera that was used.  This is a stack of the best 100 images from a 1000 frame avi.