Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, February 8, 2019.

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

The Sun remains on its spotless and relatively inactive as generally very low solar activity has persisted over the past 24 hours. No significant flaring activity was recorded. The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 0.  In spite the absence of sunspots, H-alpha imagery captured some huge eruptive prominences at the northwestern and northeastern limb and the remnant plage of the former recurring active region at the central region of the Sun’s 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)

Weather Data (4:45PM – 5:20PM, February 8, 2019):

Average Temperature: 25.77°C

Average Humidity: 23%

Average Wind Speed and Direction: 13.8 kph (variable direction)

Average Cloud Cover: 0%

Average Air Pressure: 1008.1 hpa

Average Solar Radiation: 207.0967 W/m^2

Average UV Radiation: 246 µW/m^2