No sunspot monitoring was issued yesterday, March 27-29, 2020, due to unfavorable weather (rainy to stormy) condition.

Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, March 30, 2020.

The sky was generally clear but with moderate to fresh breeze which provided good transparency but average to poor seeing at the time these images were taken.

After 20 days of spotlessness, a small sunspot group (encircled; currently undesignated) has recently rotated into Earth-view from the northeastern limb. No major flaring activity was recorded. The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 11. Other solar features observed were a couple of huge eruptive 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, especially for the newly emerged sunspot group.

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 QHYCCDIII mono 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 (5:00 PM – 5:20 PM, March 30, 2020, from NCM Al Wathba Station):

Average Temperature: 26.5°C

Average Humidity: 47.5%

Average Wind Speed and Direction: 28.95 kph from NW

Average Cloud Cover: 0%

Average Air Pressure: 1001.2 hPa

Average Solar Radiation: 219.5 W/m^2