Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, December 30, 2018.

The sky was partly covered with high thin cirrus clouds with light to moderate winds  making the seeing and transparency average to poor at the time these images were taken.

The Sun remains spotless and relatively inactive with no significant flaring activity recorded as generally very low solar activity has persisted over the past 24 hours. The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 0. Several huge eruptive prominences at the limbs, few plages including the remant plage of AR2729 on the Sun’s disk, and an elongated stable filament at the far southern hemisphere were 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)