SUNSPOT MONITORING – OCTOBER 14, 2019

Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, February 1, 2019.

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

The Sun remains spotless as generally very low solar activity has persisted over the past 48 hours (from the previous monitoring period). No significant flaring activity was recorded. The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 0.  Despite the absence of any visible sunspot groups, the Sun exhibited some active plasma ejections through the presence of several eruptive prominences at the limbs and few filaments especially at the far northwestern portion of the Sun’s disk 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 (5:00 PM – 5:20 PM, October 14, 2019):

Average Temperature: 34.75°C

Average Humidity: 36%

Average Wind Speed and Direction: 28.1 kph from NNE

Average Cloud Cover: 0%

Average Air Pressure: 1001.95 hpa

Average Solar Radiation: 67.045 W/m^2

Average UV Radiation: 30 µW/m^2 (low)

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