Seething Sunspot Movie

Longest Movie Yet

The movie promised in my last post is now finished!

Large, complicated sunspot group 1476 was centrally located on the Sun's face during my last solar imaging session on May 11. Here's how the Sun looked in white light at the time I was observing. (This is an image from the orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory, not one of my images.)

Giant sunspot group 1476 is centered in this SDO image.

Now look at a magnified image of the same sunspot group in hydrogen-alpha light taken with my telescope. (This is actually one still frame halfway through the movie I made.)

Sunspot group 1476 in h-alpha (Click for full detail.)

Once a minute, for two hours, I recorded a 400-frame video clip of  this sunspot group with my Lunt 100mm solar telescope, a 2X Barlow lens, and a DMK41 camera. These 121 video clips captured solar activity from 9:54 am to 11:54 am EDT (13:54 to 15:54 UT) on May 11. When the 121 still frames derived from these videos are played at the rate of 10 frames per second they produce a 12-second movie showing two hours of solar activity. This is the longest solar movie I've made so far. The full size 30MB movie was too large to upload, so I had to split it into two parts and do significant cropping on each. (It may take a few minutes for the movies to load, so be patient. The movies should run automatically, but, for some reason, they sometimes don't. You might have to click on the movie to make it start.) 

The first movie below is the left side of the full frame showing a small, energetic, white flare with accompanying gas jets.

The next movie is the right side of the full frame including the largest dark umbral region. Narrow, white, energetic regions writhe and glow.

The movies loop continuously. If you watch different portions of the frame as the loops cycle, you can see interesting action almost everywhere. Slight blurring appears from time to time due to atmospheric turbulence.

Hours of painstaking manual alignment failed to remove the slight jitter in these animations. The problem is primarily caused by unavoidable image rotation as my alt-azimuth telescope mount tracks the Sun's movement across the sky. I'd like to get a high quality equatorial mount with arc-second tracking accuracy, but a lottery jackpot would have to come first. I found a perfect, beautiful, quality mount sold by Astro-Physics. The price? Close to $7,000!!! Yikes!!!