So far this summer i've been really unlucky with solar observing, either the weather has been bad or i've been tied up with work. This morning there was some brief and unexpected clear skies so I managed a quick full disk in calcium wavelengths. The sun is very quiet at the moment with no sunspots and only a couple of areas of plage. Taken with the 40mm scope at 560mm focal length with the home brew CaK filter and the PGR Chameleon 3 camera.
The seeing was just about holding up for the 100mm of aperture of the Tal100R refractor this morning so I decided to go for an animation to see what this active region was up to. This is just over 6 minute real time - before the clouds came back! with a cadence of 4 images a minute revealing just how quickly things change on our star. Using a double stacked Daystar Quark and a 0.7x Baader solar telecompressor brought the focal length to a manageable 3 metres. Using a PGR Chameleon 3 camera with 2x2 binning meant short exposure (3ms) times were possible to tame the seeing.
I started off imaging with the 203mm Airylab HaT this morning, but the seeing was awful, and after shooting about 20 file runs this really was the best of them (and it's not very good!), so rather than pursuing this fruitless avenue I decided to back off to the 100mm scope instead.
A lovely great big prominence visible this morning on the suns eastern limb. Normally I don't both imaging proms but this one was too much to miss out on. Taken with the Tal100R refractor at ~3000mm focal length with the Double stacked Daystar Quark and PGR Chameleon 3 camera using 2x2 binning.
The sun is quiet at the moment bar the large single active region with multiple spots. The seeing had really gone bad when this shot was taken, so much that I was only able to shoot at 400mm focal length with the 40mm scope using the home brew CaK filter and the PGR Chameleon 3 camera.
This active region has been growing quite quickly since rounding the limb a few days ago, as seen in this animation over 36 hours of SDO data. So far it has not shown any signs of flaring, but hopefully this will change in the days ahead!
Despite having to shoot through haze and ramp the exposure up, it was very easy to see just how dynamic this crown of plasma was as it spitted and changed form in real time on the laptop screen. Since seeing it yesterday morning it is apparent there is a large single spot associated with it. I needed to take a lot of images to find a best one, as the seeing and transparency weren't great, but, this came out ok. Taken with the 203mm Airylab HaT at ~6m focal length with the Double stacked Daystar Quark and the PGR Chameleon 3 camera using 2x2 binning.
This may seem a fairly insignificant bit of the sun, but with its plage and filamentary structures marking magnetic fields, this area is the relic cores of some of the active regions that we have seen in the past couple of months. The seeing wasn't great but shooting enough data and lucky imaging meant I was able to recover something usable. Taken with the 0.2m Airylab HaT, the double stacked daystar Quark at ~6m focal length with a PGR Chameleon 3 camera with 2x2 binning.
