Solar Prominences & Sunspot 12704 in HA | April 16th 2018

Heya,

Really chilly this morning here in Florida, weird! In the 50's F, but sunny and clear skies, so I couldn't resist taking a look at the major prom developments and decaying arch prominences from the past few days. AR12704 is more active and has more interesting features and has appeared in white light (but barely visible). In HA, AR12704 has plenty of interesting activity around it though. I imaged both wavelengths to show the comparison. Seeing was poor, a solid 1 most of the time. It was difficult to even focus in white light, so I wasn't able to get critical focus for the white light sunspot and dumped most of that data. I only kept one sequence of the white light sunspot to show as a comparison to it's HA brother. That sunspot is just so tiny in white light. But it seems more active than it was a few days ago, so maybe there will be something to look forward to over the next 2~3 days while it's still facing us.

Celestron Omni XLT 120
Baader UV/IR Block Filter
Quark Chromosphere (Hydrogen Alpha)
ASI174MM Camera
Baader Solar Film (White Light)
Baader Solar Continuum (540nm) Filter (White Light)
Explore Scientific 3x Focal Extender (White Light)
Orion Sirius

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/26aq​zzG

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/J6jR​fQ

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/J6jK​XL

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/2595​Lff

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/Gz25​4P

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/Gz24​Rz

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/26aq​AXb

Wow! I'm pretty much speechless regarding that large prominence. Absolutely amazing!

The other shots are great, too.

I'm trying to remember... have you done any time lapse animations of prominences?

I've done a few time lapses, they take a lot of time and effort, around 30 minutes to an hour of data to see enough change and make it interesting. I've done more sunspot time lapse though, watching the crackling movement of the chromosphere. Very interesting stuff. But requires again a lot of time and effort to do. I don't do them as often.

Here's a time lapse from a while ago, of AR2645 (took 300 frames every 60 seconds x 45 minutes):

https://astrob.in/2897​51/0/

Very best,

Keep on Rocking MalVeaux!!