September Sun

September 10, 2011

Cloudless sky and a quartet of sunspots invited solar observing on September 10. Pleasantly mild temperature, few bugs, and occasional gentle breeze added to the enjoyment. My new motorized focus mechanism worked flawlessly right from the start. I can now determine precise focus on my laptop screen without vibrating the telescope. Also, I FINALLY managed to eliminate extremely annoying dust from my Barlow lens. This dust was extremely hard to see until I looked at the lens surfaces with a microscope. A small hand-operated dust blower did not remove the long-settled dust, so I had to use Q-tips with alcohol. After cleaning I expected to see no dust blobs in my images, but new dust managed to get deposited in the short time it took to attach equipment to the telescope. Fortunately, I was able to blow this new dust away with the hand blower so all was well.
Here are some prominences I saw:

(Click for full detail.)

(Click for full detail.)

My original goal was to capture 60 videos of the largest sunspot, sunspot 1289, in 60 minutes to make a movie of the sunspot's activity. After much labor I did produce the movie. As Johann Kepler once said, " How small a heap of grain we have gathered from this threshing!" It so happened the sunspot was mostly inactive during the hour I chose to observe. The movie showed some movement of gases, but nothing good enough to post here. Here's underperforming sunspot 1289 on the right:

Sunspot 1289 (Click for full detail.)

The other three sunspots were not as spectacular as 1289. Here is sunspot 1290:

Sunspot 1290 (Click for full detail.)

Next is sunspot 1287:

Sunspot 1287 (Click for full detail.)

Finally, sunspot 1283 was near the Sun's limb. It emitted a spectacular flare not long before September 10. A movie of that flare would have been really beautiful. Maybe I'll get lucky some day and catch a violent eruption while I'm actually observing!

Sunspot 1283 (Click for full detail.)