October 30th was the perfect fall day for solar observing. It was 60 degrees and not one single cloud appeared in the blue sky. A light breeze ruffled my papers. I settled in for a comfortable uninterrupted afternoon with my telescope. Good fortune ended when I tried to open FireCapture, the software that operates my camera. An error message appeared. The "Java Virtual Machine Launcher" told me it "could not create Java virtual machine". Why did this have to happen on such a perfect day?
I had installed a Java update two days before October 30th. Apparently, the update changed a crucial setting somewhere in the mysterious hidden jungle of computer code. So, most of the beautiful afternoon went by while I tried to fix the problem. I looked for driver updates and online troubleshooting tips as wasted minutes ticked on. Nothing solved the problem. Eventually, I operated the camera with bare bones software shipped with the camera itself. This software was a very poor substitute for FireCapture. I struggled with unfamiliar settings and inefficient features. In the end, I was able to produce only two decent pictures.
The next two images show amazing sunspot 2443 not long after it rotated into view around the Sun's eastern limb. A large prominence was located nearby. The sunspot was flaring with lots of neighborhood motion. I had planned to make a time lapse video of this activity, but the software problem canceled that plan. A few days after these images were made the sunspot was more centered on the solar disc. Then its complicated structure was more clearly visible. Two large umbras on the right were trailed by a bunch of smaller umbras stretched out in a long line. This is one of the most unusual sunspot arrangements I've seen. Both images below are 2-panel mosaics. Since they were taken at two different times, there is a slight difference between the images, mostly visible in the prominence and limb features.
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