Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, February 13, 2019.

The sky was partly cloudy with moderate air turbulence making the seeing and transparency average to poor at the time these images were taken.

The Sun displayed some interesting solar phenomena this day and picking up intensity gradually, though generally very low solar activity has persisted for the majority of the 24-hour monitoring period. A small bipolar active region is seen developing at the encircled location. This will be closely monitored on its development in the next few days. No significant flaring activity was recorded. The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 1.  H-alpha imagery revealed several huge prominences at the limbs and few tiny plages on the Sun’s disk.

Space weather agencies* forecast solar activity to remain at very low levels with chances of weak X-ray fluxes or flares ranging up to B-class intensity. Close monitoring is being conducted by numerous space weather agencies for any significant development.

Equipment used are Skywatcher 120mm refractor telescope with Baader filter and unmodified Canon EOS 1D Mark IV DSLR camera for visible imagery and Lunt H-alpha solar telescope and ZWO120MM CMOS camera for H-alpha imagery, mounted on Skywatcher EQ6 Pro. Pre-processing of visible solar images was performed in PIPP, stacking in Autostakkert, slight wavelet adjustments in Registax 6 and post-processing in Adobe Photoshop CC.

*Technical reports courtesy of Solar Influence Data Center (SIDC), NOAA-Space Weather Prediction Center (NOAA-SWPC)

Weather Data (4:30PM – 5:20PM, February 13, 2019):

Average Temperature: 22.3°C

Average Humidity: 43%

Average Wind Speed and Direction: 26.65 kph from NNW

Average Cloud Cover: 55%

Average Air Pressure: 1009.55 hpa

Average Solar Radiation: 238.0325 W/m^2

Average UV Radiation: 319.5 µW/m^2 (low)