Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, February 20, 2019.

The sky was partly cloudy with intermittent moderate to fresh breeze making the seeing and transparency poor at the time these images were taken.

The Sun is still spotless and inactive as generally very low solar activity over the past 48 hours (from previous monitoring). No significant flaring activity was recorded. The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 0.  Solar features visible are the remnant plage of former AR2733 with a huge elongated stable filament and few small quiescent prominences at the limbs as 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 (2:30PM – 2:45PM, February 20, 2019):

Average Temperature: 24.3°C

Average Humidity: 40%

Average Wind Speed and Direction: 23.75 kph from NW

Average Cloud Cover: 60%

Average Air Pressure: 1006.4 hpa

Average Solar Radiation: 742.5 W/m^2

Average UV Radiation: 1400 µW/m^2 (moderate)