No sunspot monitoring posted for the past 2 days (March 18-19, 2019) due to unfavorable weather condition (mostly cloudy to overcast skies with passing light to moderate rains) prevailed at those times.

Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, May 20, 2019.

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

The Sun has returned to its spotless and generally inactive state after the departure and decay of AR2741 for the past 2 days. The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 0.  Few prominences at the limbs, including huge eruptive one at the southwestern limb, were the only visible solar features 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 (5:20 PM – 5:40 PM, May 20, 2019):

Average Temperature: 34.8°C

Average Humidity: 39%

Average Wind Speed and Direction: 31 kph from NW

Average Cloud Cover: 20%

Average Air Pressure: 995.65 hpa

Average Solar Radiation: 196.495 W/m^2

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