Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, January 1, 2018.
The sky was partly covered with high cirrus clouds with light air turbulence making the seeing and transparency average at the time these images were taken.
As 2019 began, a potential bipolar active sunspot region was seen developing at the encircled location of the Sun’s disk. The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 2. H-alpha imagery revealed the associated plage of this developing sunspot region, a huge stable filament still visible at the far southern hemisphere of the Sun’s disk and prominences, including a huge eruptive one at the southwestern limb and a small quiescent one at the northwestern limb.
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)
