SUNSPOT MONITORING – SEPTEMBER 18, 2021

Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, September 18, 2021.

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

Solar activity is at low levels with no sunspot groups visible for the 4th consecutive day. The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 0. Despite being spotless, a couple more C-class solar flare activities were being produced from an active region about to rotate to Earth-view from the SE limb (featured image; appears as a region of scattered enhanced plages at this point), as recorded by space weather agencies this morning.

Nothing much significant going on with the Sun lately aside from some small quiescent prominences at the NW limb, as well as few huge eruptive prominences at the SE limb, and few moderately huge elongated filaments across the Sun’s disk as distinctively captured in H-alpha imagery.

Space weather agencies* expect very low solar activity with the likelihood of flaring activities not exceeding C-class levels in the next few 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. 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.


*TECHNICAL REPORTS COURTESY OF SOLAR INFLUENCE DATA CENTER (SIDC), NOAA-SPACE WEATHER PREDICTION CENTER (NOAA-SWPC)

Weather Data (5:00 PM – 5:30 PM, September 18, 2021, from NCM Al Wathba Station):

Average Temperature: 41.0°C

Average Humidity: 13.0%

Average Wind Speed and Direction: 23.67 kph from N

Average Cloud Cover: 5%

Average Air Pressure: 1001.0 hPa

Average Solar Radiation: 138.0 W/m^2

P.S. We won’t be posting our sunspot monitoring bulletins starting tomorrow, September 19-30, 2021 due to work setup changes of the solar observer. For the latest solar updates, feel free to check out spaceweather.com, SIDC, NOAA-SWPC, and other space weather websites. Clear skies.

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