Sunny Mother's Day

A Sprinkling of Sunspots

May 12th, Mother's Day, was sunny, dry, and breezy. Several sunspots were scattered across the Sun as shown in the following 5-image mosaic made with a 2X Barlow lens.

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The next image is a closer look at the biggest sunspot, 1745, which appears at the upper left in the image above. Smaller spot pair 1744 is seen at lower right in the image below.

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Sunspot 1746 had a small outburst above it.

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Two nice large prominences were also visible on the Sun's western limb. This one had a dark filament to its left.

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A bit further around the southwestern limb was a second large prominence shown here in bright yellow.

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Many images from this observing session were poor in quality, partly due to bad seeing. I also noticed tracking problems due to the initial poor telescope mount alignment. My driveway was recently paved, and my carefully positioned tripod placement marks were paved over. Although I used the compass feature on my smart phone to initially align my tripod north-south, apparently, this alignment was several degrees off true north. So there was more drifting than usual during my video imaging segments.