Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, March 15, 2021.
The sky was slightly hazy to partly cloudy (high-level clouds) with intermittent moderate breeze which provided average to poor transparency and seeing at the time these images were taken. Unfortunately, not white-light imagery posted here because of low image quality due to obstruction of clouds.
AR2808 (Axx/alpha) has lost much of its sunspot structure and currently inactive. On the other hand, AR2809 (Cso/beta) had re-grown its sunspot structure with few small spots emerged; also dormant. Another small bipolar sunspot region is seen developing to the SW of AR2809 (encircled). The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 25. Few weak B-class flaring activities from AR2808 were recorded by SIDC and NOAA-SWPC over the past 48 hours.
Nothing much significantly going on with the Sun lately aside from some small enhanced plages associated with AR2808, AR2809, and the other developing one near AR2809Â as well as few small quiescent prominences at the opposite (SW and NE) limbs, as distinctively captured in H-alpha imagery.
Space weather agencies* forecast solar activity to be at very low levels with chances of solar flares of up to B-class intensity mainly from AR2808. 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. For H-alpha imagery, the equipment used are Lunt 60mm H-alpha solar telescope, and QHYCCD 290III mono camera; all mounted on Skywatcher EQ6 pro mount 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 (4:40 PM – 5:00 PM, March 15, 2021, from NCM Al Wathba Station):
Average Temperature: 27.85°C
Average Humidity: 37.5%
Average Wind Speed and Direction: 20.7 kph from NNW
Average Cloud Cover: 45%
Average Air Pressure: 1002.2 hPa
Average Solar Radiation: 226.5 W/m^2
