Sunspots Before Aurora Display

Sunspots One Day Before Geomagnetic Storm

Months of cloudy weather finally ended enabling my first solar imaging session since July. Lovely cloudless skies continued for several days in early October. The following October 9th satellite view shows clear sky over Virginia, a good opportunity for solar observing.

Conditions were wonderful as I began imaging at 9:30 am EDT. It was 60 degrees under cloudless blue sky with no wind. When I quit one hour later, the temperature had risen to only 63 degrees. Seeing conditions were good, but not exceptional. Although the Sun displayed few dramatic prominences this day, several nice sunspots and filaments were spread across the solar disc as shown in the next 9-panel mosaic.

From left to right above are sunspots 3852 at lower left, 3849 and 3850 in the middle, and 3848 on top. Remnants of departing sunspot 3842 are on the right edge of the solar limb. (Click on the image to enlarge.) 

A few prominences can be seen on the limb when the mosaic above is processed differently. Enlargement also reveals some evidence of activity rising slightly above sunspot 3842 near the right limb.

Four major sunspots show good detail in the following 4-panel mosaic with 3848 at the top, 3849 and 3850 in the middle, and 3852 on the bottom left. The big filament to 3848's left was long lasting. Enlarge the image and notice a small eruption from 3852's umbra in the lower left corner.

Sunspot 3848's umbra looked like a Halloween skull! An X-class solar flare from this sunspot on October 8th produced the coronal mass ejection which caused the dramatic auroral display on October 10th. I wasn't lucky enough to capture that flare when I observed on October 9th. The image below was one day too late!

The next image's lower left shows a small white flare erupting above 3852's umbra at 9:37 am EDT.

With luck I won't have to wait another two months for an opportunity to use my solar telescope.

Aurora in Virginia!

Rare Light Show

Sitting in my living room on the evening of October 10th I began receiving numerous notifications about dramatic auroral activity. Normally, I ignore these alerts because the chance of seeing an aurora at my southeastern Virginia latitude of 37.4 degrees is very low. This time, however, an unusually big geomagnetic storm was predicted, so, just to check, I peeked outside at the northern horizon where I saw a dim red glow unlike the usual glow from light pollution. Next, I grabbed my phone and took a quick 2-second handheld exposure to check the aurora possibility. To my surprise I saw lots of red and even some green! So I rushed inside to tripod mount my Nikon Z6II. Nikon images quickly confirmed that an actual aurora was ongoing! Here's one of the first pictures I took at 10:31 pm EDT.

You can see hints of green on the right. The green faded quickly, however. I should have gone outside 30 minutes earlier. I suspect the green color was more intense then. You can see red becoming stronger relative to green in the next image taken one minute after the previous one.

Soon red became the dominant color covering most of the northeastern sky.

The light show steadily diminished. By 10:54 pm EDT the familiar curtain shape often seen in auroras appeared. 

Finally, by 11:34 pm EDT, most of the display had faded away. Only a dim red pillar was visible in the northeast running through the constellation Taurus.

The NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center produced the following forecast map for this October evening. 

Auroras over Canada were a sure thing according to this map, but not such a sure thing in Virginia. Auroras are very rare in Virginia. I've seen dramatic auroras in Iceland and Norway, but I've seen only one other aurora in Virginia since moving here 47 years ago. So it was a special thrill to see this limited light show from my backyard!

Star Clusters

Collecting Messier Objects

My ongoing quest to get Seestar images of all Messier objects took a big step forward recently. Every October seems to include a period of clear sky and mild autumn temperature, a welcome relief from months of steamy, cloudy summer nights. On October 5th there were no clouds, little moonlight, and only a couple temporary neighbor lights to interfere. I captured a good number of Messier star clusters to add to my collection.

Some open clusters are very pretty like M52 in Cassiopeia shown in the first image below, a 5-minute exposure. Note the small bit of red nebulosity at the top. This is the edge of the Bubble Nebula, NGC7635.

Another beautiful cluster in Cassiopeia is M103 shown next in a 3-minute exposure. Star colors here aren't as dramatically evident as I'd like. I don't know how to solve this color problem.

Open cluster M21 in Sagittarius is next. It's located near the beautiful Trifid Nebula, M20, partially visible at the bottom right of the following 3-minute exposure. I find M21's little circular loop of stars very attractive.

Probably the most famous open cluster of all is the Pleiades in the constellation, Taurus. A 20-minute exposure revealed some of the white reflection nebula lit by cluster stars. When I captured the next image the Pleiades happened to be oriented in just the right way to fall almost entirely within Seestar's limited field of view. This was a happy surprise!

Open cluster M34 in Perseus is a bit less striking than the previous clusters as you can see in the next 5-minute exposure.

The Messier catalog contains a couple of oddball members like the asterism M73 in Aquarius shown in the next 2-minute exposure. Perhaps the small group of four stars seemed like a fuzzy object in Messier's telescope? 

There are A LOT of globular clusters in the Messier catalog including a number of small unimpressive ones. If you've seen one of these unimpressive globulars, you've seen them all. So I'm not displaying all the globulars I captured this night, only the next two. First is globular cluster M10 in Ophiuchus. It has a good sized diameter in the following 10-minute exposure.

Globular cluster M30 in Capricornus appears smaller than M10. It has three short lines of stars pointing nearly towards its center. Each stellar line consists of three equally bright stars. These distinctive lines are visible in the next 10-minute exposure when you click on the image to view it at full size.

It took a 30-minute exposure to show inner parts of face-on spiral galaxy M74 in Pisces shown next. 

Finally, I attempted to capture a portion of the Heart Nebula, IC1805, in Cassiopeia. The entire nebula is too large to fit within Seestar's field of view, so I tried to include just the brightest portion. Even so, red nebulosity is barely visible in the next 30-minute exposure. Perhaps more would show up in darker skies and longer exposures.

I learned a valuable lesson during this Seestar session. Anticipating a long night, I used a charger cable and extension cord plugged into Seestar to keep the battery fully charged. I control Seestar from inside my house and was so lulled into indoor comfort I didn't check the cord status as I should have. After some time I noticed battery charge declining instead of remaining steady. When I went outside to see what was wrong I found the charging cord wrapped around Seestar several times like a boa constrictor! Fortunately, Seestar hadn't tipped over, but increasing cable tension had eventually broken the cord's USB connector and pulled it out of Seestar's USB port. I'll never make this mistake again! Seestar completes several complete rotations during a long night finding targets all over the sky. In the future I need to check outside more often.

I've now imaged 60 of the 110 Messier objects. As the October clear period continues I hope to increase the collection and post more images soon.