October 5th Sun Movie

Beautiful Clear Sky!

A spectacular giant erupting sunspot moved across the Sun's disk in late September. Uncooperative completely cloudy weather here in Virginia prevented observation of the fireworks. A stretch of excellent weather arrived soon after with mild temperature, low humidity, and not one cloud in the sky. Several sunspots were present on October 5. Here is sunspot 1309:

Sunspot 1309 with sunspot 1312 in upper left. (Click for full detail.)

Changing the view slightly shows sunspot 1312 on the left and 1309 on the right with spicules along the Sun's rim:

Sunspots 1312 and 1309 (Click for full detail.)

Here's another pair of sunspots on the opposite side of the Sun:

Small sunspot 1306 on left, larger spot 1305 on right. (Click for full detail.)

I spent most of the observing session trying to record a small eruption near sunspot 1313. Here's an image of emerging sunspot 1313:

Sunspot 1313 is in the upper left. (Click for full detail.)

One 400-frame video was recorded every minute for one hour. Each video eventually produced one still frame. Hours of tedious manual alignment of these 61 still frames produced the following movie showing one hour in the life of sunspot 1313 from 11:39 AM to 12:39 PM EDT. This will take some time to load before it plays at normal speed. Please be patient!

Look at the spray of gas erupting in the upper left! Some movement is also visible along the snake-like filament on the right. Sadly, the movie continually jiggles because, even after hours of manual alignment, I could not get the individual frames perfectly aligned. Almost every feature on the Sun is continually moving, so it's hard to find fixed reference points to align. Although the dark sunspot umbra here stays fairly constant, it is small and not very distinct. The solar rim should also be a fixed feature. Unfortunately, the exact position of the rim seems to depend on the exposure settings of the camera which changed automatically as the image drifted due to imperfect tracking. In the future I need to improve image alignment.