Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, November 12, 2018.

The sky was clear with light air turbulence making the seeing and transparency good at the time these images were taken.

A new bipolar sunspot group was seen developing at the near central portion of the Sun’s disk (to be designated as AR2726). The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 3.  H-alpha imagery reveals some eruptive prominences at the opposite (particularly northeastern and west-southwestern) limbs, well-defined filaments, and a plage associated with the developing active region.

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. The extent of the frequency and intensity of the Sun’s activity will highly depend on the magnetic flux fluctuations happening in the visible ARs in the coming days. 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 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)