Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, November 26, 2018.

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

The lone visible sunspot group AR2728 has experienced significant structure decay, barely visible in white-light imagery, but easily distinguished in H-alpha imagery. The active region was generally inactive, absent of any significant flaring activity based on space weather agency records.  The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 12. The associated plage with small filament from AR2728, as well as few eruptive and quiescent prominences were distinctively captured in H-alpha imagery.

With this stance, pace weather agencies* expect 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)