Solar Scars 17/04/2006

Image taken with PST, 2x barlow, 20mm eyepiece and Canon 300d.
Very few prominences today. Nice detail on the disc though.



Clear skies,

Image taken with PST, 2x barlow, 20mm eyepiece and Canon 300d.
Very few prominences today. Nice detail on the disc though.
Clear skies,

Michael - only a few small prominences as you say but incredible mottling and other surface detail all over the disk. I'm using a 20mm Japanese Erfle for the first time today (have to pull it out of the holder a bit to get focus) and it seems to be perfectly matched to the PST as I'm seeing surface detail and contrast no other eyepiece, including the original Kellner or my Naglers, Radians and Vixen zoom, are coming near matching. Those five footprints or tracks are really nice. Visually continue the curve upwards (as seen through the PST) and there's a fine semi-circle filament and right in the centre of the sun are two large irregular pale patches and some smaller ones and another sizeable filament over to the right.

Can you guys actually determine what these 'footprints' really are? I mean, are they scars of that sunspot group from the last week in March? Or if we did not have the spots, be something like shadows (I know...) of flares rising up from the surface? Or am I just being hopefull on the second option?

Can you guys actually determine what these 'footprints' really are? I mean, are they scars of that sunspot group from the last week in March? Or if we did not have the spots, be something like shadows (I know...) of flares rising up from the surface? Or am I just being hopefull on the second option?

Seanie - these are a series of filaments (complex streamers of gas in or above the chromosphere). They appear dark against the sun when viewed like this but at the edge of the solar disk, are known as prominences.

Flares would appear extremely bright and only last minutes up to four hours at best.

Gordon,
Great detail alright!

I took another stab at processing the image to boost the contrast.

Thanks for the clarification Gordon!

Nice images Mike!