Monday 2 January 2017

A Busy Western Limb in Ha - 2nd January 2017

Hydrogen Alpha at 656.28nm was proving itself to be the wavelength of choice on this, my first imaging session of 2017.  There were plenty of smaller scale features to be seen including a number of small but well defined prominences, some of which merged into filaproms.  A small emerging flux region crackled with magnetic energy, however is unlikely to develop into much more, and on the disk a number of darker filaments, cooler clouds of solar plasma held aloft by magnetic fields could be well seen.  The image was taken with a Coronado PST double stacked with a Lunt50 etalon along with a PGR Chameleon 3 camera and a Daystar Interference Eliminator to apply tilt to the optical plane to get rid of banding issues caused by Newtons Rings.