Vern’s Weblog

Here is an image of the Mercury transit in h-alpha. I had grand plans of imaging Mercury with the Toucam at fairly high magnification as it entered the sun’s disk. I spent some time figuring out the position relative to the new giant sunspot (which will probably be designated AR10923). Then I got the bright idea of planetary tracking Mercury with the scope. On the monitor it looked about right about 20 - 30 degrees or so below AR 10923. I kept watching, it was 12:12:40 MST and still no Mercury — panic as I should have seen it 20 or 30 seconds earlier! Fortunately, I had set up the A1010 refractor nearby and easily spotted it visually at low power. It took a minute or so to find it and then reset the capture software. The scope had the RA correct but the declination was wrong. I should have known better as I could have easily confirmed North/South.

Equipment was a Solarscope LTD 50mm h-alpha telescope and Phillips Toucam 840. One hundred seconds video at 15 fps. About 1/4 of the frames were removed because of high wind gusts jittering the view.

Below image of Mercury transit of the Sun taken at 12:40pm in white light.

Image taken with Celestron Nexstar11 telescope, Celestron F6.2 focal reducer, and Phillips Toucam 840 webcam. Sky was clear, wind 10-20 mph, turbulence was poor (4/10), temperature was 82°F, transparency very good.

The US National Weather Service’s Space Environment Center has just released test images from the solar xray imager aboard the latest GOES-13 satellite.

See http://www.sec.noaa.gov/sxi/goes13/latest.html

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%.

Here is the sun in white light. I did h-alpha as well, but missed focus — out of practice I guess! Active region 10898 on the east limb (left) at 350 milli-hemispheres is the largest we’ve seen for a while.

Image of the sun was taken with 80mm refractor telescope, a Stellarvue A1010, Teleview 2.5X Powermate, and Canon 300D digital camera. Shutter at 1/250 sec at ASA 100. About 18 images aligned and stacked with Registax3, wavelet filtered, and color adjusted.

I counted about 10 spots in region 10892 near mid-disk with 80mm Stellarvue A1010 refractor with Baader filter and Televue Zoom eyepiece at 8mm.  Region 10893 futher to the east (left) had 8. Both have grown quite a bit since I observed them a couple days ago.  Partly cloudy, turbulence 6-7/10, transparency good, temperature of 85°F at 11:50am MDT when the series of white light images was taken.

The h-alpha showed some brightening around region 10892 near mid-disk when this image was taken at 11:34 am MDT with Solarview 50 h-alpha telescope, Televue 2.5X Powermate, and Canon 300D DSLR.