SUNSPOT MONITORING – MAY 2, 2020

Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, May 2, 2020.

The sky was partly cloudy with moderate to fresh winds which provided average to poor transparency and seeing at the time these images were taken.

There are returned on its spotless state after the decay of AR2760 and AR2763, as well as the departure of AR2762 (SIDC reported a weak B-class flare from this sunspot region yesterday) from Earth-view at the northeastern limb. The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 0.  The disintegrating remnant plage of AR2760 is still noticeable, together with few prominence activities at the opposite (east-northeastern and west-southwestern) limbs and short stable filaments across the 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 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 – 5:30 PM, May 2, 2020, from NCM Al Wathba Station):

Average Temperature: 39.17°C

Average Humidity: 23.7%

Average Wind Speed and Direction: 15.73 kph from relatively north direction

Average Cloud Cover: 35%

Average Air Pressure: 995.93 hPa

Average Solar Radiation: 249 W/m^2

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