Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, December 31, 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 remained quiet on the last day of 2018. Generally very low solar activity has persisted over the past 24 hours neither any visible sunspot regions nor significant flaring activity recorded. The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 0.  In spite the absence of sunspots, some prominences, including huge eruptive ones at the southwestern limb and few other small quiescent ones, as well as few big elongated filaments at the far southern hemisphere and plages on the Sun’s disk 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)