Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, December 29, 2018.

The sky was clear with light air turbulence making the seeing and transparency good at the time these images were taken.

The Sun has been spotless and generally inactive with no significant flaring activity recorded for over 2 weeks (14 consecutive days) straight. 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 has been exhibiting several eruptive prominences at the limbs, few elongated filaments at the far southern hemisphere and the remnant plage of former AR2729 still visible across the H-alpha solar disk.

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)