A Little More Solar Observing

I am still feeling rather lousy and lacking energy so I didn't think it would be wise to do much today.  My plan was to lay low and recover.  I want this virus behind me...  once again!  (Perhaps the third time is the charm.)  

The lawn is in need of mowing but I have been putting that off for the past few days in an attempt to recover.  This morning was a fairly clear day outside though so I mustered up the energy to drag one of my telescopes outside to do some solar observing again for a short while.  This wouldn't require nearly as much energy as mowing the lawn or any other project that needs to be done so solar observing was the thing to do this morning.

This time I grabbed my longest telescope so I could do some closeup observing. I haven't used this telescope in a while.  This telescope is fairly long at 1000mm.  When we combine that with the internal Barlow lens of the Quark Chromosphere hydrogen alpha solar filter I was using, that put my total focal length at 4200mm.  This telescope is at a focal ratio of f8.3 which is just about perfect for this particular solar filter.  This telescope would provide me with some nice closeups.  

Unfortunately, the seeing wasn't all that great which is fairly typical around these parts.  There were very high wispy clouds along with some scattered lower cumulous clouds.  The atmosphere was a bit hazy too and it was getting hazier as the morning progressed.  By the time I had everything set up, the sky was looking closer to white than blue.  

There were a few decent prominences to watch.  This is bubbling plasma being shot up along magnetic lines.  There was one visible active region too.  I managed to capture a couple of snapshots of the active region as well as the largest of the prominences.  

These snapshots won't win any awards but they do accurately represent what I was observing.  The snapshots are a nice record to have of what I saw and did this morning.  

This first snapshot, below, is the one obvious active region that I observed.  There isn't much happening here in the big scheme of things.  Actually, the sun was rather boring this morning which is quite different than what I had been seeing over the past few months.  There wasn't a whole lot to see today but there was more to see than a completely featureless sun. 

We are coming out of a "solar minimum" of the 11 year solar cycle so the sun is slowly becoming more active with more features.  

This next snapshot captured that one large prominence I mentioned previously.  You can see hot spicules along the limb licking up and outward toward space.  

I have a large IR/UV Cut filter on the front end of this large telescope to serve as an Energy Rejection Filter (ERF) to help cut down on heat build-up inside the telescope.  I also had a smaller IR/UV Cut filter on the front end of my diagonal at the back end of the telescope too.  This helped protect my eyes as well as protect the expensive hydrogen alpha filter.  Everything remained at a safe temperature with these filters.  

It was a nice morning and I enjoyed my short time of solar observing.  I did tons of coughing especially when I was moving stuff around but it was nice to get outside.  On the positive side, all the resulting coughing helped to clear some of the gunk out of my lungs.  Let's hope this trend of recovery continues....