Enormous Prominence

Prominences Galore!

On April 23rd a dramatic giant prominence rotated into view on the Sun's eastern limb. Although only two days had passed since my last observing session, I went out again to image the behemoth. It was another windy spring day with gaps between clouds.

The following 5-image mosaic, made with a 2X Barlow lens, shows a huge portion of solar limb occupied by the monumental prominence.

A magnified view shows the mighty prominence itself.

Prominences also graced the Sun's western limb as shown in the following 5-image mosaic. (Click on the images for a larger view.)

Disc features are overexposed in each of the previous images in order to reveal the dim prominences.

I spent a good deal of time this day trying out a new camera and wondering why it wasn't functioning as expected. It finally dawned on me that I inadvertently bought a color camera instead of a monochrome camera! I thought I had purchased a monochrome camera and expected monochrome camera behavior, so I was constantly puzzled by the results I was getting. It makes no sense to use a color camera for hydrogen-alpha solar imaging because solar filters pass only very, very monochromatic red light. I hope to have the correct monochrome camera soon. I'll write about the camera's performance in a future post.