SUNSPOT MONITORING – DECEMBER 22, 2018

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

Here is the recent white-light solar imagery taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, December 22, 2018.

The Sun remains spotless as generally very low solar activity has persisted over the past 24 hours. No significant flaring activity recorded. The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 0.

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, 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)

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