Sunspot Movie

Disappointing Result

For a bit more than an hour during my last solar imaging session on April 20th I captured an image every 60 seconds hoping to catch some interesting activity near multiple sunspots 2993, 2994, and 2995. The time lapse animated GIF's shown below were constructed from the 65 images obtained. (It takes a while for the GIF's to load, so be patient.)These animations run in a repeating 13-second loop. They compress 71 minutes of actual time into about 13 seconds of movie time. In the wide frame view above you can see the c-shaped dark filament to the left of the central sunspots move like a snake toward the largest umbra. A quick bright eruption bursts out at the very beginning of the animation, but quickly disappears. Other more subtle changes happen in areas between umbras. Focus attention on individual small areas as the movie repeatedly cycles to see changes. The next cropped animation makes this easier.Catching a truly dramatic flare or major filament eruption is really a matter of luck. Obviously, I wasn't lucky during the 71 minutes I observed. Unfortunately, atmospheric seeing conditions worsened as the minutes passed. Image details are sharp near the beginning but fuzzy towards the end because the atmosphere was increasingly unsteady. Finally, here's one more slightly enlarged version to help distinguish detailed changes. (Click on the video to see more detail.)The animations above were made by capturing one video clip every minute from 9:49 am to 11:00 am EDT (13:49 to 15:00 UT). I eliminated only one particularly fuzzy image from the sequence near the end and added one extra image to the start before the small white initial eruption occurred. Each individual movie frame is a stack of 50 frames from a 500 frame video clip. Ultimately, I'm disappointed by the fuzzy results and lack of drama in the final results.