No sunspot monitoring was issued yesterday, July 16, 2020, due to unfavorable weather conditions (mostly cloudy skies brought a dissipating thunderstorm cloud).

Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, July 17, 2020.

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

The Sun remains generally spotless and inactive over the past 48 hours. The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 0. No significant flaring activity was recorded. Nothing much significant going on with the Sun lately except several tiny quiescent prominences at the limbs and a remnant disintegrating enhanced plage of a former potential sunspot group at the far southern hemisphere which didn’t develop further 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 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. 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 (5:35 PM – 5:55 PM, July 17, 2020, from NCM Al Wathba Station):

Average Temperature: 44.73°C

Average Humidity: 20%

Average Wind Speed and Direction: 15.13 kph from NNE

Average Cloud Cover: 5%

Average Air Pressure: 983.47 hPa

Average Solar Radiation: 155.33 W/m^2