SUNSPOT MONITORING – FEBRUARY 26, 2019

Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, February 26, 2019.

The sky was mostly clear with intermittent moderate to fresh breeze which provided good transparency but poor seeing at the time these images were taken.

The Sun remains in its relatively inactive and spotless state as generally very low solar activity has persisted for 26 consecutive days now. No significant flaring activity was recorded. The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 0.  In spite of the absence of any visiblesunspot regions, active prominence activity are evident (mostly pillar-shaped ones which are all quiescent) at the limbs as 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)

Weather Data (4:40PM – 5:00PM, February 26, 2019):

Average Temperature: 23.4°C

Average Humidity: 44.3%

Average Wind Speed and Direction: 28.6 kph from NW

Average Cloud Cover: 5%

Average Air Pressure: 1003.3 hpa

Average Solar Radiation: 182.72 W/m^2

Average UV Radiation: 393 µW/m^2 (low)

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