Erupting Prominence

Surprise Explosion!

A warm afternoon of solar observing preceded the nighttime session I wrote about in my previous post. The April 2nd afternoon Sun displayed a nice variety of sunspots and filaments, but seeing was not very good. Consequently, the images below aren't as sharp as I'd like. I'm still waiting for a day with good seeing. Maybe morning sessions will have steadier air than afternoons.

The first image below is an imperfect mosaic of 18 individual images taken with a 2X Barlow lens. At top left are sunspots 2027 and 2022. Below them on the left are sunspots 2028 and 2026. Large sunspot group 2021 is just below center to the right. Some nice filaments stretch over the right half of the Sun. The lower left portion of the image is missing because I sometimes lose track of where I am on the disc while moving the telescope to capture patches of the Sun's surface.

My goal for the day was to test a newly acquired tilt adjuster to see if it would eliminate circular interference fringes which have plagued magnified images made with my 5X Barlow lens. The fringes were there as usual before I placed the tilt adjuster into the optical path. When I finished installing the adjuster, the fringes were gone! It worked! I was pleasantly surprised! Below are three magnified images made with the 5X Barlow lens. Details are not particularly sharp, but there are no interference fringes.

First is sunspot 2022 showing a parade of dark arches between the large spot and its small companion.

Next is sunspot 2027 whose dark umbra is split by a curved white energetic feature. More intense white emissions pour from under a dark arching filament in the region to the left of the spot.

Finally, the three-umbra sunspot group 2021 sits in the midst of swirling spicules.

Eventually, just by chance, I'll be lucky to observe in good seeing. When that happens I'm curious to see how much more detail I can capture with the 5X Barlow lens.

After imaging the features on the solar disc I roamed around the rim looking for interesting prominences. That's when I came upon an erupting prominence! Below are two images captured shortly after the eruption began.

The erupting prominence is the tall feature emerging nearly perpendicular to the solar rim. The previous images were taken just two minutes after I first noticed the explosion.

Usually, prominences move rather slowly. This eruption was the first time I've ever seen motion rapid enough to be noticed in just a minute or so. When I first brought the eruption into the field of view it was a small bright lump. A minute later the bright lump had grown significantly outward, and I said, "Whoa!"

Below is a movie showing 11 minutes of action beginning with a bright lump at 3:12:36 EDT and ending with rapidly dimming outward movement at 3:23:19 EDT. I made twenty, 200-frame videos - one every 30 seconds for roughly 11 minutes. The twenty videos resulted in twenty still frames which make up the movie.

The solar surface on the left wavers and goes in and out of focus as the movie plays because the seeing was changing over the movie's duration.