Framed Filament

Sunspots Surround Filament

It was cloudy for nearly a month since my last solar observing session, and the Sun was almost featureless. But conditions were promising on the morning of June 7th. Forecasts predicted no clouds or wind. The wind prediction was correct, but there were many high thin clouds, often from jet contrails. I decided to set up my telescope anyway. There were many gaps among the clouds, and lots of sunspots had recently blossomed. I'm glad I persevered because the seeing was about as good as it gets.

Sometimes, by luck alone, random factors coincide to yield high quality initial telescope alignment. This was my lucky day! The Sun was almost perfectly centered on the eyepiece crosshairs after the telescope was first commanded to slew to the Sun.

I was set up and ready to observe by 9:00 am but had to wait 15 minutes for a cloud to pass over the Sun. Once I began recording video clips I could see how steady the air was. Detail in the following images is as good as I can ever expect to get. There were no spectacular prominences on display, but five sunspot groups surrounded a dramatic c-shaped filament centered on the Sun's disc.

The first image below is a 15-image mosaic, made with a 2X Barlow lens. Arrayed diagonally above the central dark filament, from left to right, are sunspots 2082, 2079, and 2077. Below and left of the filament are two active areas: 2080 nearest the filament, and 2085 to the lower left of 2080. (Click on the images below for a larger view.)

Sunspots frame the filament very nicely! Here's another mosaic, this time made from 10 images, showing a closer view of this pretty group of features.

The large, c-shaped filament, surrounded by sunspots in the previous two images, lasted for many days. A week after I took these pictures the filament had grown longer and rotated onto the Sun's western limb where it became a huge prominence hanging above the limb.

Since the air was so steady, I tried making magnified images of some individual sunspots with a 5X Barlow lens. First, here is sunspot 2079:

Next is sunspot 2082:

Finally, here are the incredibly complicated sunspots 2080 and 2085:

One side of these sunspots is a north magnetic pole and the other side is a south pole. The nearly parallel curved dark lines stretching between opposite magnetic poles make magnetic field lines near the sunspots visible.