Solar activity reached moderate levels over the past 24 hours. The newly designated sunspot group AR2822 (Modified Zurich/Mcintosh sunspot configuration: Cso/beta) exhibited slight growth in its structure and surprisingly produced a moderate M3.9-class solar flare with a follow-up non-Earth directed weak coronal mass ejection (CME) yesterday, May 7 /19:04 UTC as recorded by NOAA-SWPC.  The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 15.

Nothing much significant going on with the Sun at the moment except for few elongated filaments across the solar disk, enhanced plages associated with AR2822 and another one near the Sun’s central meridian, and small quiescent prominences at the limbs as distinctively captured in H-alpha imagery.

Space weather agencies* forecast solar activity to be at low levels with chances of solar flares of B-class to C-class intensity, mainly from AR2822. 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.