Nice Day in the Sun

Perfect Weather!

After nearly a month of clouds, heat, and high humidity a huge Canadian high pressure area settled over Virginia on September 10. My morning observing window was beautiful, with cool, low humidity air and gentle breezes from time to time. Too bad there weren't more solar features to go along with the nice weather. I did manage to capture a few nice pictures with good detail. Sunspot 1566 was accompanied by two filaments as shown in the image below.

Sunspot 1566 and filaments (Click for full detail.)

Inverting the previous image emphasizes the floating nature of the filaments.

Sunspots 1562 and 1564 were about to rotate around the Sun's western limb.

Sunspots 1562(R) and 1564(L) (Click for full detail.)

I made several mosaic attempts. The best result shows a strip spanning the width of the Sun. Sunspot 1567 is emerging on the left and sunspot 1566 is to the right of center. This mosaic is composed of 5 individual images. Unfortunately, the blog format will not display this detailed image at its full size.

(Click for full detail.)

My new telescope mount has arrived! More about this in my next post.