October Clear Spell

Bad Seeing

Very often an extended stretch of clear skies happens during October. This year hardly any clouds appeared between October 18th and October 21st. On the 18th, the first clear day, I made a special effort to use my solar telescope since it had been more than a month since my last observing session. It was a cool 50 degrees and breezy. Seeing conditions were forecast to be poor, and the forecast was correct. Solar features were a blurry, jittery mess. Nevertheless, I captured enough videos to construct the following 29-panel imperfect mosaic which shows a modest array of solar features.

Sunspot pair 2436 is on the left near the limb. Sunspot 2434 is below center. One large prominence is on the lower left rim, and a few filaments are scattered about. The mosaic posted here has been reduced to one quarter size from the original. If you click on the image and examine it closely, you will see some blurry areas which were captured when the seeing was particularly bad.

Prominent sunspot 2434 was surrounded by some nice filaments shown in the next image made with a 5X Barlow lens.

Details in the previous image are not as sharp as they could be, but, considering how turbulent the air was, the image is not bad.

Only 40 minutes after I started capturing videos some fair weather clouds began drifting by. The seeing was so poor that I decided to end the session and hope for steadier viewing the next day. The next day actually did turn out much better as you will see in my next post.