Solar Flare

Explosion in Progress

During the morning of October 7th a complex sunspot group produced an M1 class solar flare over a period of about 3 hours. At this time my sky was clear and observing conditions were excellent. For a telescopic sun watcher like me this was like winning a lottery prize! Here's a satellite picture of cloudless Virginia while the flare happened (from the Penn State Weather Wall Map). My observing site is marked with a red X. There was no wind, the atmosphere was steady, and temperature ranged in the upper 60's. Conditions don't get much better than this, although I was buzzed by a few hovering yellow jackets! Two neighboring sunspot groups produced the flare. When I began recording at 13:54 UT (9:54 EDT) the eruption was already in progress. In the next image sunspot group 3116 is on the left and 3112 is on the right. The flare is in the white overexposed areas left of the largest umbra. (Click on the images for enlarged views.)  Later, at 14:35 UT (10:35 EDT), the situation had changed. The next image shows the sunspots 41 minutes after the previous image was recorded. Seven minutes later, at 14:42 UT (10:42 EDT) the white energetic areas deformed further.  My last image, captured at 14:56 UT (10:56 EDT), showed more changes. I quit imaging when seeing conditions worsened. Apparently, I stopped before peak flare output, as you can see in this graph from the Space Weather website. It shows the timing and intensity of the flare. It would have been nice to record a series of evenly spaced images over an hour or more to produce a smooth time lapse flare animation. Unfortunately, it's only possible to animate a time span of 21 minutes between 14:35 and 14:56 UT with four unevenly spaced pictures. The greatest changes happen in the white eruption just above center. Small arching filaments also change shape just to the right of the biggest dark sunspot umbra.  Next is a 9-panel disc mosaic which shows the sunspot group nearly centered. A few filaments are scattered about. There were nice prominences around the solar rim as you can see in the next 15-panel mosaic. The disc has been overexposed to make the relatively dimmer prominences stand out.  Just as in my last observing session, the eyepiece view of prominences was outstanding. The delicate, fan-like prominence on the bottom was particularly beautiful! In the eyepiece the Sun and prominences are a deep red color that I find difficult to faithfully reproduce in my images. The next picture, with overexposed disc blacked out, attempts to capture the eyepiece view. It doesn't quite do the job, however. All images above can be enlarged for a more detailed view. They look best that way.