Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, April 23, 2019.

The sky was partly cloudy with intermittent light to moderate winds which provided average seeing and transparency at the time these images were taken.

Solar activity has been relatively quiet over the past 24 hours. No active sunspot regions currently exist on the Sun’s visible disk. No significant flaring activity was recorded. The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 0. In spite of the absence of any active sunspot regions, the Sun unleashes impressive prominence activity with huge eruptive ones at the limbs in the northern hemisphere 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 (5:05 PM – 5:15 PM, April 23, 2019):

Average Temperature: 28.05°C

Average Humidity: 39%

Average Wind Speed and Direction: 25.2 kph from NNW

Average Cloud Cover: 65%

Average Air Pressure: 1002.25 hpa

Average Solar Radiation: 240.825 W/m^2

Average UV Radiation: 540 µW/m^2 (low)