Solar Flares and Smoke

Unlucky Timing

More than a month of cloudy weather followed my last solar imaging session. Finally, on May 22nd, clouds cleared. Unfortunately, the sky was a hazy white instead of blue. Conditions were otherwise quite pleasant with temperature ranging between 63 and 70 degrees. A fair number of sunspots and prominences were visible as you can see in the following full disc image, an imperfect 20-panel mosaic.

Separate mosaic panels did not blend well below center, so a vertical line of brightness difference runs down the middle of the mosaic. My monochrome camera produces black and white images to which I later add color. The next image is the same mosaic as above, but colored to approximate the red hydrogen-alpha light I see visually through my telescope's eyepiece.

In the first moment my camera became operational I noticed how dim the video preview was. I had to increase camera gain and adjust the "gamma" in order to see something similar to what I would normally see on a clear blue sky day. The white hazy sky was definitely attenuating light! The haze was caused by smoke blown eastward from distant western Canadian wildfires. The next two satellite images show the smoke over much of the USA and penetrating into my home state of Virginia.

Smoke degraded my images, but interesting things showed up anyway. An active string of sunspots in the Sun's northeast quadrant pointed toward a hazy "filaprom" on the nearby limb. This is the most detailed image I captured and shows well at full size.

Complex multi-umbra sunspot group 3311 is located between sunspot 3313 on the left and 3314 on the right. Soon after this image was captured a solar flare exploded in 3311. More on this below.

The other major sunspot was 3310 whose umbra dominates the next image below. To the left of 3310 is an area of white energetic emission called active area 3312. Area 3312 also emitted a solar flare near the same time as 3311's flare.

Sometimes changes happen rapidly on the Sun. It takes luck to be observing the active part at just the right time. For example, at 9:06 EDT I saw the following erupting spike prominence coming off the limb from departing sunspots 3308 and 3305.

If I had started imaging sooner, I would have been able to watch this grow in real time. Instead, I saw it slowly evolve into the following small arching prominence 10 minutes later at 9:16 EDT.

Unlucky timing continued. Images for the following 5-panel mosaic were obtained between 9:23 and 9:26 EDT.

Twenty one minutes after 9:26, at 9:47 EDT, I moved back to sunspot 3310 and discovered active area 3312 (to the left of big umbra 3310) was flaring. The flare shows up as a white overexposed area at 9:47. (Compare with the 9:26 mosaic above.)

For the next 20 minutes I watched this flare fade away. I had missed the flare rising. Then I moved up to sunspot group 3311, north of 3310, and saw a flare in 3311 at 10:14 EDT! Once again, the flare is a white overexposed area in the next image. (Compare, again, with the mosaic above.)

Once again I missed the flare buildup! I could only watch it fade away over the next 10 minutes. Sky conditions worsened and it was time to quit. In spite of unlucky timing it was still exciting to see two flares on the same day.