Giant Prominence and Spicules

Many nights before heading to bed, I continue to try to refine my workflow for processing my solar imagery data.  I'm definitely beginning to understand what needs to be done in this process because I feel my resulting images are getting better and better. 

This photo, below, is a photo I compiled and processed from data collected just a couple of days ago on July 31st.  

I've found that when I black out the disk/sphere of the sun, everything on the limb of the sun really stands out.  The fine hair-like spicules of red-hot plasma are clearly visible all along the limb.  In this particular shot, there is a rather large prominence too which really is the main subject here.  This is red glowing plasma consisting of hydrogen and helium.  This prominence is flowing and looping along magnetic fields about 24,000 miles into the corona from in front of the limb to back behind the limb in this photo.  Generally speaking, prominences can flow and loop into the corona upwards of tens of thousands of miles and sometimes hundreds of thousands of miles off the surface of the sun's chromosphere.  

Although I used the term "surface" in describing what appears to be the outer edge of the sun, this surface shouldn't be thought of as a solid surface.  This is all plasma in the form of a hot gas at about 14,000°F so it is a very dynamic surface that is always in motion.  The transition area from the chromosphere into the sun's corona is only about 60 miles but rises in temperature quite quickly from 14,000°F to 900,000°F.   

The spicules along the limb of the sun (the edge of the circumference of the sun) are also red glowing plasma consisting of hydrogen and helium.  

For this image, I was imaging in the Hydrogen Alpha wavelength which records light only in a very narrow band of red, specifically, at the 656nm wavelength.  Light visible to the human eye is in a very wide band of wavelengths from 380nm to 700nm but, in this photo, we are looking at a very narrow band of light at only 656nm.  Looking at data showing only this narrow wavelength allows us to see the hydrogen in the sun's chromosphere.  

Beneath this chromosphere is the photosphere.  I also occasionally image the photosphere by recording all of the blindingly bright white light of the photosphere that overpowers the hydrogen alpha red of the upper chromosphere.  The only way to see the hydrogen alpha of the chromosphere is to block out all of the other wavelengths of light.  This image below is a very narrow wavelength in hydrogen alpha red light showing the outermost layer of the chromosphere, the transition region and the beginning of the corona.

To provide a reference of the size of the sun and these features, I overlaid an image of the Earth as though it was sitting right next to the sun.  The Earth's diameter at just under 8000 miles is 109 times smaller than the diameter of the sun.  The spicules seen along the limb in this photo are almost the same size as the diameter of Earth while this particular prominence has a height of about three times the diameter of Earth.  

What is particularly noteworthy here is that I was not using the best camera option for this data.  I didn't have the energy to set up a computer and all the cables necessary so I used my Sony a6000 camera body instead.  Actually, I wasn't even using a tracking mount either.  I was using a manual mount with slow motion control knobs that I must turn manually to track the sun as it moves across our sky.  

Dedicated astronomy cameras require a computer for control which makes things a bit more complicated and demands a lot more energy from me.  I've been quite sick with chest congestion and a very bad cough so I'm trying to minimize all activity that causes coughing fits while still trying to stay as active as possible.  As good as this image is I wanted to point out that if I had used a dedicated monochrome astronomy camera then I could have captured even more detail!  

I shot just 15 still images in quick succession and only two of those 15 were good enough to stack so this is a stack of only two images.  Ideally, I would want about ten to twenty times that amount in a stack but, regardless, I managed to capture some significant detail in this image.

Unfortunately, this is something I can only document every now and then although I'd like to document it far more often.  The weather must cooperate.  The atmospheric conditions must cooperate.  My health must cooperate.  My astronomy gear must cooperate.  And, my schedule must cooperate.  This means I don't get to do this nearly as often as I would like.  

I really do like this image though!