Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, March 14, 2019.

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

Solar activity has been at very low levels over the past 24 hours. With the recent departure of AR2734, he Sun is currently spotless and inactive with no significant flaring activity recorded. The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 0.  Despite the absence of sunspots, the Sun still exhibits mild solar activity through the presence of several prominences (small quiescent and large eruptive ones) at the limbs, as well as tiny plages across the solar disk 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 (4:50PM – 5:05PM, March 14, 2019):

Average Temperature: 31.6°C

Average Humidity: 15%

Average Wind Speed and Direction: 18 kph from S

Average Cloud Cover: 2%

Average Air Pressure: 1003 hpa

Average Solar Radiation: 194.06 W/m^2

Average UV Radiation: 319.5 µW/m^2 (low)