Modest Sunspots

Mild November Day

On November 21st temperature ranged from 57 to 64 degrees during a fine, cloudless, windless morning while I observed activity on the Sun's face. It's hard to believe I wore just a t-shirt in November! Two modest sunspots were visible, as you can see in the following imperfect 16-image mosaic. (Click on the image for a larger view.)

Sunspot 2783 had rotated to almost center in the Sun's southern hemisphere where it was accompanied by a white active region to its left and a filament to its right. Tiny sunspot 2784 was inside the small white active area on the left side of the northern hemisphere.

Constructing this mosaic was difficult. For some reason the photomerge package included with a new modern version of Photoshop Elements would not assemble the 16 component panels properly. A much older version of Photoshop Elements on a different computer was able to put the 16 panels together correctly into a circular disc, but it wouldn't blend their slightly different brightnesses. I finally tried an older program called, Autostich, which successfully completed the task.

I began the session with a ZWO 1600 monochrome camera, but the camera control software, FireCapture, wouldn't connect with the 1600 camera. Two weeks ago the 1600 camera worked fine with the identical computer and equipment. Two weeks ago all video downloads from camera to computer were fast and efficient. This week downloads were terribly slow. I have no idea why identical equipment in an identical configuration would behave so differently. All images here were made with a ZWO 174 monochrome camera. Thank goodness the 174 camera works reliably.

Next is a close view of sunspot 2783. It is a stack of 100 best frames from a 1,000-frame video.

The next image below, taken 59 minutes after the previous image, shows some changes in the region. In the enlarged picture you can see three new radial linear features in the sunspot's penumbral region. They look like mini-filaments above the dark umbra. The shape of the dark filament to the sunspot's right also changed. (Click on images to enlarge them and see details more clearly.)

Finally, tiny sunspot 2784 in the image below shows very small dark umbras starting to form. These eventually faded away in the following days.

Tiny sunspot 2784 was in the northern hemisphere, but recent significant sunspots have appeared mostly in the southern hemisphere.

Some Solar Activity

 Complex Sunspot

Sunspot cycle 25 is slowly beginning to increase. A good-sized sunspot group was nicely placed for viewing in the Sun's southern hemisphere on November 7th. Observing conditions were ideal: no clouds, no bugs, no wind, and temperature in the upper 60's. I had not used my solar telescope in 5 months, so my imaging work was a bit rusty and inefficient. Only 6 of the 45 images I captured were useful.

Two images made with a ZWO 1600 monochrome camera and 3X Barlow lens were combined to make the following mosaic showing most of the solar disc.

(Click on the image for a larger view.) Large sunspot 2781 is below center. Another active region, number 2780, appears as a white area above center. A modest prominence rises from the solar rim in the upper right.

Sunspot group 2781 included one major dark umbra and a few smaller umbras shown in good detail in the next image.

The previous image, made with a ZWO 174 monochrome camera and 5X Barlow lens, is a stack of 100 video frames from a 1,000 frame video. Seeing was very good during image capture, so this picture represents nearly the maximum resolution I can achieve with my equipment.

Sunspot numbers should gradually increase through the coming year as you can see in the following graph from the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center.

I'm looking forward to more imaging in coming years when there are multiple sunspots, filaments, and prominences.