Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, February 18, 2019.

The sky was mostly cloudy with light to moderate breeze turbulence making the seeing and transparency poor at the time these images were taken.

The Sun remains in its spotless and relatively inactive state as generally very low solar activity has persisted over the past 48 hours (from the last monitoring). No significant flaring activity was recorded. The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 0.  Few eruptive prominences at the opposite (northwestern and northeastern) limbs, as well as the remnant plage of former AR2733 with an elongated stable filament were distinctively captured in H-alpha imagery

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 (5:00PM – 5:15PM, February 18, 2019):

Average Temperature: 22.7°C

Average Humidity: 44%

Average Wind Speed and Direction: 17.6 kph from variable directions

Average Cloud Cover: 80%

Average Air Pressure: 1001.35 hpa

Average Solar Radiation: 143.465 W/m^2

Average UV Radiation: 99µW/m^2 (low)