Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, March 19, 2020.

The sky was mostly clear with intermittent light to moderate winds which provided good transparency and average seeing at the time these images were taken.

The Sun remains in its spotless and generally inactive over the past 24 hours, extending its streak to 9 consecutive days. No major flaring activity was recorded. The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 0. H-alpha imagery revealed a tiny enhanced plage at the northeastern quadrant, being monitored for its potential active region development in the next couple of hours and few prominence activities, particularly some huge eruptive ones at the northeastern limb and small quiescent ones at the s0uthwestern 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 QHYCCDIII mono 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 (5:00 PM – 5:15 PM, March 19, 2020, from NCM Al Wathba Station):

Average Temperature: 33°C

Average Humidity: 26.5%

Average Wind Speed and Direction: 14.05 kph from SSE

Average Cloud Cover: 5%

Average Air Pressure: 998.3 hPa

Average Solar Radiation: 214.5 W/m^2