Solitary Sunspot

Sunspot Action

A long period of bitter cold, clouds, and snow followed my last solar observing session in February. Hardly any sunspots formed during this time, so I didn't miss much. Lousy weather finally ended on March 7th. Snow had melted and temperature was in the low 50's. One modest sunspot had rotated into view on the Sun's east side with some nice filaments nearby. Unfortunately, seeing was not good.

The following 6-image mosaic shows solitary sunspot 2297 near the eastern limb on the left with two distinctive filaments near the frame's bottom.

I noticed a faint thin stream of gas connected to a bright spot below the sunspot. The gas seemed to be arching up into space as you can see in the next image.

The sunspot had been erupting recently, so, I thought, with luck, I might record some action in a time lapse movie. I began recording movie frames at 1:54 pm EST, recording one image every 60 seconds. When seeing deteriorated drastically, I stopped recording at 2:26 pm EST after accumulating 32 frames. So the following movie captures 32 minutes of solar action. Hot gas seems to rain down from a magnetic arch into a thin stream hitting the bright spot below the sunspot.

There were also some nice prominences on the Sun's western limb shown in this 5-image mosaic.

I quit when bad seeing smeared detail into a blurry mess.