SUNSPOT MONITORING – NOVEMBER 21, 2018

Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, November 21, 2018.

The sky was partly cloudy with intermittent light to moderate winds making the seeing and transparency average at the time these images were taken.

Generally very low solar activity has prevailed over the past 24 hours. After the departure of AR2727, the Sun is again spotless and relatively quiet, absent of any significant flaring activity. The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 0.  H-alpha imagery reveals an eruptive pyramid-shaped prominence at the southeastern limb, a shallow elongated filament at the southern hemisphere and tiny plages across the disk.

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 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)

Recent Post