Solar Images from this Summer

Two or three times a year, I put together a small photo book of photos I have shot documenting some of the things we've done so I can send it to my father.  We haven't traveled at all since the beginning of the pandemic and we are still in no hurry for that.  Well...  we would like to travel but the risk is still too great.  I've already had the virus three times and I am still experiencing lingering problems due to the virus so I'm in no hurry to expose myself further.  My health was bad enough before these lingering problems due to the virus.  I don't need to continue to expose myself and my health to more problems.

While I was sorting through photos and choosing photos to put in this photo book, I came across some of my solar images from a session in July that were worth writing about here in my blog.  I specifically remember this particular session because I was able to watch a solar flare erupt and recede for about an hour.  It was a pretty amazing and very memorable.  

It wasn't until after the flare had subsided that I took the time to reconfigure the telescope for imaging.  I didn't want to interrupt observing the flare for fear that I would miss something while I was taking the time to change my telescope configuration.  Once I had set up the telescope for imaging, I managed to capture a few decent images of various areas of interest on the surface of the sun's chromosphere.  These weren't great images but I was able to eek out some nice detail with careful processing of the data I had collected.

Although the flare was over at this point, I was still able to capture the magnetic field lines looping and arcing around the same sunspot group where the flare was located.  There were also some large filaments which are long lines of towering hydrogen plasma above the surface of the chromosphere.  

In one of the images, my solar filter was a bit off-band so I ended up capturing parts of two layers of hydrogen plasma.  This created some interesting spicule patterns on the surface of the chromosphere so I kept that image as well.  It sort of appears double or triple exposed.  

The atmospheric conditions by the time I set up for imaging were pretty lousy.  I would capture more than a hundred frames for each image but I could only stack five or so images of each of the hundred.  The conditions were so lousy that the images weren't lining up well enough to stack.  If they don't stack well enough, the final image just gets blurry and sort of smeared.  This meant it would be tough to get nice clean and sharp images from this data.  

Regardless, I managed to get some decent images anyway of a solar astronomy session that was very memorable.  Not too many people can say they've watched a solar flare for an hour!