Vern’s Weblog

Some interesting prominence were visible off the east and southeast limb in h-alpha.

H-alpha images were obtained at using a Solarscope Ltd Solarview50 h-alpha telescope, Televue 2.5X Powermate, and Canon 300D Rebel (1/400 sec shutter at ASA400 for disk and 1/80 sec shutter at ASA 800 for limb). Images were aligned and stacked with Registax3, colorized with ImagePlus, oriented, composited and cropped with Photoshop Elements2. Weather in Louisville, CO was mostly clear,  transparency was excellent, turbulence was 6/10, no wind, temperature was 89°F, humidity 30%.
No sunspots visible in this image of the sun.

White light image was obtained with Baader filter, Stellarvue A1010 (78mm refractor) telescope, Televue 2.5X Powermate, and Canon 300D Rebel camera (1/250 sec shutter at ASA 100).  Weather in Louisville, CO was mostly clear,  transparency was excellent, turbulence was 6/10, no wind, temperature was 89°F, humidity 30%.

If you haven’t given it a try yet, you might consider giving NASA World Wind a spin or two. It is somewhat similar to GoogleEarth but doesn’t have the privacy issues involved with sending all your clicking habits to Google. World Wind is not Earthbound, you may visit other world’s such as Mars and the Moon. Both GoogleEarth and WorldWind are great applications, each has their own advantages and disadvantages.

Earlier this morning, I completed an overlay for the folks at the National Weather Service’s Space Environment Center. The overlay displays the auroral power influx as measured by NOAA POES satellites, which gives some indication of auroral activity. Current version doesn’t update automatically — I’ll add that shortly.

Information and links for downloading NASA World Wind is available from http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/

After you get World Wind installed, you may download the Aurora overlay from the National Weather Service Space Environment Center at http://www.sec.noaa.gov/pmap/GEpmap/

General information about auroras is available at http://www.sec.noaa.gov/pmap