First Solar Images of 2012
It's getting warmer! The vernal equinox is near. Flowers bloom, birds sing, and the Sun is now high enough to clear obscuring trees. On March 10th I did my first solar observing session since last November. One major sunspot group was present along with a giant, arc-shaped filament group, a nice prominence, and some smaller sunspots.
The first image shows active region 1429 next to smaller region 1430. In the days before this image was taken active region 1429 emitted flares and coronal mass ejections toward Earth causing geomagnetic disturbances and auroral displays. You may have heard about them on the news during the week of March 5-10.
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| Active region 1429 with largest sunspot (left). Region 1430 has a smaller spot and white energetic eruptions (right) (Click for full detail.) |
Although the sky was completely free of clouds on March 10th, seeing conditions were not very good. Video images danced and wavered. Therefore, these images are not as detailed as I'd like. Small sunspot 1428 looked like this:
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| Sunspot 1428 (Click for full detail.) |
An enormous arc-shaped filament group hovered above small sunspot 1432:
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| Sunspot 1432 is near the white eruptions in the lower left. (Click for full detail.) |
Finally, a nice prominence hung above one place on the Sun's limb:
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| Nice prominence! |
These images were obtained with a Lunt 100 mm hydrogen-alpha solar telescope, a DMK 41AU02.AS camera, a 2X Barlow lens, and image processing with RegiStax 6 and Photoshop Elements. Each image is a stack of 200 separate video frames.
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