Successful Mosaic

Spiky Eruption

Two cold fronts passed in succession leaving a clear sky on September 14th. Observing conditions were wonderful. Temperature ranged between 68 and 71 degrees, and a slight breeze puffed from time to time. It had been cloudy and hot nearly every day for the previous three weeks, and the Sun had been almost entirely blank. So it was nice to finally have some modest solar activity on a comfortable clear day. This Modis satellite image shows how cloud free it was over the eastern U.S. coast on September 14th. My location is marked with an arrow.

The cloudless sky gave me time to capture the entire Sun in the following 38-panel mosaic using a 5X Barlow lens. The image presented below is only one quarter the size of the original 6826 by 6284 pixel image! Four sunspots are visible in the southern hemisphere. From left to right they are numbered: 2418, 2415, 2412, and 2414. Some nice prominences adorn the eastern and western limbs. This is the most successful mosaic I've made so far with my ZWO ASI174MM camera. (Click on the images for larger views.)

The next 4-panel mosaic shows a closer view of sunspots 2418 and 2415.

Sunspots 2412 and 2414 were near prominences on the Sun's western limb.

While capturing videos for the whole disc mosaic I was lucky to see a temporary spiky eruption from the vicinity of sunspot 2418. The eruption didn't last long, probably less than 20 minutes.

Finally, I tried making an image from a 2000-frame video instead of my usual 400-frame video. The following picture of sunspot 2415 was made by stacking the best 100 frames from a 2000-frame video.

The previous image contains probably the best detail I'll ever get with my particular combination of telescope, camera, and viewing location.