Pre-Eclipse Imaging Reflection

About a week before the eclipse, I brought the telescope I had planned to use for imaging outside to make sure everything was working together as it should.  I mainly wanted to check the new telescope mount with automatic GPS tracking but I figured I'd might as well put everything all together to test them.  The new mount worked just fine and that is where my attention was but it turns out that I had also found an unexpected problem.  I was getting a reflection of the sun in the lower left quadrant of the image which you can see in the animated GIF below. 

While I was outside testing the mount, everything seemed to be working just fine but after bringing everything back indoors and uploading the photos and videos to my desktop computer, I noticed this odd reflection on my monitor.  I knew I had to correct that before the day of the eclipse.

When I brought everything outside again for a second test, I found that the easiest way to eliminate this reflection was to tilt my solar filter slightly.  I was using a glass solar filter mounted on the front end of my telescope so it was very easy to slightly tilt this filter.  The moment I slightly tilted the filter, the reflection disappeared.  

This was good news because chasing a reflection could be challenging.  Finding the source of the reflection isn't always so easy.  

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I brought everything outside again this morning to take a look at the sun in Hydrogen alpha.  This was the same telescope and mount but the filtering was completely different.  Plus, I was using my binoviewers this morning too.  The binoviewers make viewing a whole lot easier than viewing with one eye.  I set everything up in a few short minutes and then plugged in my Hydrogen alpha filter so it could warm up.  

When it was ready for viewing, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the condition of the sun was much different than what we had seen on the day of the eclipse.  On the day of the eclipse, the sun was rather featureless.  Now the sun had rotated about halfway to the opposite side of the sun and we were looking at all sorts of interesting features on the sun.  

I saw a bunch of prominences off on one side of the sun as well as some very interesting filaments.  Some filaments were thin while others were quite large.  There were a few areas of plages which are white areas which generally appear lighter than the surrounding area in Hydrogen alpha.  This time, however, I noticed one large sunspot grouping with very distinct white channels of plages.  This was very noticeable and distinctive.  Within a few minutes, these white plages turned into well over a dozen sunspots!  I quickly (perhaps too quickly) surmised that I had just missed a fairly big flare.  

I was thinking that there was a solar flare that was emitted from this sunspot grouping...  as the flare settled down, I was seeing the white plages from where the flared erupted.  Then, as this magnetic activity settled down, a whole bunch of small dark sunspots developed.  

The seeing was terrible...  the sky conditions were unsteady and the wind was gusting...  but I wanted to increase my magnification to see if I could count how many sunspots had developed.  The wind was rocking the telescope back and forth which made it incredibly difficult to view and even more difficult to keep count of the sunspots that were very close together.  What would have been crisp in my view was now mush.  Still, I managed to count over a dozen of these small black sunspots.  

During this relatively short period, I was constantly trying to tune the Hydrogen alpha filter to be on band.  I just couldn't seem to find the right tuning but, considering how shaky the view was due to the wind, this wasn't much of a surprise.  

In hindsight and especially since I couldn't get the Hydrogen alpha filter turned on band just right, I'm thinking it is highly likely that what I surmised were more than a dozen small sunspots were really something called Ellerman bombs.  Seeing these is quite rare!

These Ellerman Bombs are like mini solar flares of magnetic chaos.  I have to do some research but I think these would sometimes develop between bipolar sunspots.  This particular grouping that I was observing did appear to be bipolar.  Although I say they are mini flares they still have the power of 100,000 WWII atomic bombs. Since I was having difficulty getting the filter on band, this helped in allowing me to see these rare features.   

That was interesting to watch develop right in front of my eyes!

I wanted to take a closer look at this sunspot active region so I decided to pull out a larger telescope to attempt to observe the Photosphere in white light.  I would have a clearer view of the sunspots this way. 

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After a short observing session in Hydrogen alpha, I brought out one of my large telescopes to try some white light solar observing with my 2 inch solar wedge and various secondary filters.  I did this for two reasons.  First, I wanted to test various filters in various combinations to see what it did to the quality of the images.  I also wanted to take a closer look at this very active region of sunspots and attempt to more accurately count the newly developed sunspots or Ellerman Bombs.

I have a Baader Nebula filter that allows only certain wavelengths of light to pass through.  One of the three bands of light that this filter allows through is O-III (oxygen).  This happens to be a good bandwidth to view the sun in white light so I was hoping for the best.  Unfortunately, this filter isn't all that narrow plus it has two other bands of light.  I did see some sharper detail though compared to when not using this filter.

So, I'm thinking that if I purchase a very narrow bandwidth filter that only allows a very narrow band of O-III through, I should get even more crisp images.  Unfortunately, the narrower the bandwidth of the filter, the higher the price so I need to decide how narrow to go.  There probably will be diminishing returns at a certain point so I probably don't need to go as narrow as possible.  My sky conditions will be a limiting factor too.  I think if I get a narrowband filter of a relatively medium narrowband wavelength, then I should benefit greatly by using it.  

I haven't ordered one of those filters yet.  I still trying to decide how narrow to go.

Back to counting the newly developed sunspots or Ellerman Bombs in that active region...  I never did get an accurate count because my seeing was terrible and the wind was rocking my telescope back and forth but my best guess would be in the 15-16 range.  What is remarkable is that these small black features had no penumbras...  just umbra.  This fact, combined with what I had observed just prior to the development of these features, leads me to lean more toward these features being Ellerman Bombs as the aftermath of some sort of magnetic storm that developed some level of solar flare.  

Overall, it was a fairly productive hour of solar observing this morning!