Prominence to Filament

3D Transition

Prominences climb above the Sun's limb like huge flames. Solar rotation will eventually bring a prominence on the eastern limb onto the Sun's disc. If the prominence lasts long enough for this to happen, it will appear as a dark, cloud-like filament hanging above the brighter background.

A few days before my observing session on August 27th a huge prominence was suspended above the Sun's northeastern limb. By the time I observed on the 27th solar rotation had brought this prominence onto the Sun's Earth-facing disc where it could be seen as the enormous elongated filament visible in the first image below. This picture is a 3-image mosaic made with a 2X Barlow lens showing the three-dimensional transition from prominence to filament. Only a small portion of the filament still remains as a limb prominence seen against black background. Solar rotation from east to west is from left to right in the image. It's easy to see how the diagonal, elongated filament was once near the limb a few days before.

The next picture is a 26-image mosaic showing the entire solar disc on August 27th. Some nice, nearly vertical filaments are present as well as four sunspots. (Click on the image for a larger view.)

Filaments float nicely in this inverted image.

Next is a closer view of the sunspot triangle near disc center. Sunspot 2149 is on top with sunspot 2151 (left) and sunspot 2150 (right) below. This is a 9-image mosaic showing good detail.

Remaining sunspot 2148 was approaching the western limb. It rotated out of sight two days later.

Seeing was reasonably good on the 27th, so I decided to construct a time lapse video of sunspot 2149. I'm still processing the images and will try to feature the movie in my next post.