Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, February 14, 2019.
The sky was partly cloudy with intermittent light to moderate winds which provided average to poor seeing and transparency at the time these images were taken.
Solar activity has been at very low levels over the past 24 hours. No active sunspot regions currently exist on the Sun’s visible disk. The small bipolar active region from that emerged yesterday did not develop further and was decaying. Meanwhile, a recurring active region (found to be AR2733) is seen rotating towards Earth-view from the eastern limb and shall be the source of gradual increase in solar activity on the next couple of days. The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 0. H-alpha imagery revealed several eruptive prominences at the limbs, including the huge hedgerow one at the northwestern limb, as well as plages associated with the upper-mentioned active regions.
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)
Weather Data (4:45PM – 5:20PM, February 14, 2019):
Average Temperature: 24.3°C
Average Humidity: 40.3%
Average Wind Speed and Direction: 20.4 kph from NE
Average Cloud Cover: 70%
Average Air Pressure: 1006.5 hpa
Average Solar Radiation: 229.56 W/m^2
Average UV Radiation: 393 µW/m^2 (low)
