Sunspot Exit

Sunspot Parade Ends!

On August 1 three large sunspot groups were spread in a line across the Sun. Ten days later, on Wednesday, August 10, solar rotation had carried them around almost entirely from the Sun's Earth-facing side. Only active, flare emitting spot number 1263 remained right on the Sun's edge. In the images I made below on August 10 you can see gases erupting from sunspot 1263 at the bottom of the Sun's rim.

Spiky gas columns emerge from sunspot 1263 at bottom (Click for full detail)

The red image above was taken at 9:38 am.  The next image of the same sunspot was taken 34 minutes later at 10:12 am, magnified 2X, and colored differently.

The shape of the gas eruptions seems to have changed. (Click for full detail)

 

 

Three minutes later it looked like this:

The gas plume on the left seems to have changed. (Click for full detail)

Finally, 19 minutes later at 10:34 am the eruption looked like this:

The eruption seems to have changed again. (Click for full detail)

During this imaging session I was plagued with poor seeing (atmospheric wavering), and poor tracking. I suspect some of the gas cloud shape changes may not be true changes. Instead, they may be caused by the way the camera handles brightness variation across the solar image. I'm disappointed by the lack of crisp detail in some of these images. When the telescope is buffeted by wind, when the images are drifting in the field of view, and when the air is unsteady, it's hard to get sharp detail.

Just for fun, here's one more image of a prominence on the side of the Sun opposite from the previous images.

Nice prominence (Click for full detail)

What do you think of the blue-shaded false color? It seems to make details easier to see than the true red color or grayscale.