Sunday, November 24, 2013

Lifting Prominence

If you have been following the weather here in Tucson, or perhaps watched the roasted Duck that the Arizona Wildcats football team served up yesterday afternoon (Bear Down!), you know that we have had record November rainfall here in the naked pueblo.  As the low pressure system loses its local organization and begins to move out we are left with partly cloudy and fairly unstable skies.  Still, I set up my 60mm HA solar telescope to take a look at the Sun between clouds this afternoon and was delighted to see some nice limb activity.  As active region 11899 departs, it is putting on a farewell show- and the prominence activity on the limb is the result.  After a few minutes observing and allowing the telescope to reach thermal equilibrium, I attached the ASI camera and took a 30 second avi of the Sun.  Given the lack of stability, I only used 300 frames (out of about 1000) and stacked them to get the image below.  It is at the full resolution of the camera and slightly reduced in size for aesthetics.  In addition, I took the liberty again of brightening up the prominences in order to show the one that is lifting off.  It is slightly over-sharpened, I think, but given the low quality of the original data, no complaints.


And just for fun, here is the same image inverted:


Here is a similar image, binned 2X2, with less attention to the prominences:



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