Tuesday, 30 July 2019

Filaments Mid Disk - 29th July


I took these shots of the filaments that are currently sat mid disk on the sun, these mark the position of the boundaries of coronal holes, that, also in turn mark the position of the boundaries of the magnetic fields associated with a region of the sun that spawned active region way back in the spring time.  This has survived several solar rotations now, with each rotation manifesting itself in slightly different form as it becomes weaker.  There is every chance that this region is the last major event of cycle 24 and so represents the 'terminator' event for this cycle.  While the magnetic field strength has dropped below the 1500 gauss needed to produce sunspots, there is sufficient magnetic fields to still produce filalments and also coronal holes.  It may well be that when the features we see above have finally totally (magnetically) diminished that this is when cycle 25 starts to kick in proper.  This may well have a few more rotations of activity left in it before it is gone, but will be interesting to track and hopefully observation backs up the theory.  The top image was taken with the 8" HaT and Daystar Quark with the 0.7x Baader Solar Telecompressor and the FLIR GH3 IMX174 camera, bottom image shows wider scale with the SM90 double stacked with the Daystar Quark and the FLIR GH3 ICX916M camera.