Prominence & Filament - 2nd March

prom filament, a photo by Mark Townley on Flickr.

Taken with the 70mm PST mod and 2.5x powermate a delicate prom and filament can be seen on the solar limb.

AR11680 70mm f15 - 2nd March

ar11680 70mm f15 bw, a photo by Mark Townley on Flickr.

I really liked the delicate filaments that were associated with this active region.

Emerging Active Region 2nd March

emerging active region 70mm f15 bw, a photo by Mark Townley on Flickr.

This emerging active region was as yet undesignated at the time this image was took using the 70mm PST mod at f15 using the 2.5x powermate.

Ha Full Disk - 2nd March

Ha full disk colour, a photo by Mark Townley on Flickr.

A trifecta of full disks from the 2nd march - this was taken with the 70mm PST mod at f12. The longer wavelengths of hydrogen alpha allowed me to up the image scale here. I really like how this new scope is performing and the lovely detailed images it produces. It is a great compromise between size and ability to work well in poor seeing conditions. I believe later in the year when the sun is higher in the sky and seeing is good - saturday seeing was dire! This scope will pull out an extra level of detail. This is producing full disks that are 2000x2000 pixels, and if we do ever get a busy solar disk this year I may have to make a print of it for hanging on the wall using this scope.

CaK Full Disk - 2nd March

CaK full disk colour, a photo by Mark Townley on Flickr.

Taken with the 70mm frac @ f9 using the homebrew Cak filter that is a Baader K-line, Coronado Front filter and ND-less Lunt solar wedge as an ERF, this image shows that despite their being little current activity on our star there are rumblings going on beneath the surface. The white areas on the disk are areas of turbulent magnetic froth associated with strong magnetic fields. Sadly if the field strength is below 1500 Gauss this will not manifest itself as sunspots on the solar surface.

White Light Full Disk - 2nd March

wl full disk colour, a photo by Mark Townley on Flickr.

Taken with the 70mm f6 with Lunt wedge and baader continuum filter and DMK31, this image shows perfectly what I was saying about in my previous post regards the suns lack of any real activity. In a year of solar maximum we would expect considerably more activity than this relatively blank disk shows.

Double Peaked Solar Cycle 24? - 2nd March

I've mentioned a couple of times over the past months on this blog as to what is happening, or not happening, with solar cycle 24.  Well 2013 has started off so far being pretty uneventful in terms of solar activity, especially seeing as 2013 is supposed to be the year solar maximum occurs in.  However recently solar physicists have been looking at past solar cycles and have decided that they haven't been single peaked, rather double peaked events, with a maximum occurring in one solar hemisphere, then a maximum occurring in the the opposite solar hemisphere.  This isn't difficult to believe, in fact if you look back at images on this blog site you will see that activity has been mainly focused in the northern hemisphere.  This means that as 2013 passes we should (in theory!) see more sunspot activity in the solar southern hemisphere, it will be interesting to see if this is the case, let's hope it is!

NASA have produced a great video about this and can be seen below...