Contains:  Solar system body or event
Our active Sun in 45 minutes Ha animation: full disk and very active prominences, Rick Veregin

Our active Sun in 45 minutes Ha animation: full disk and very active prominences

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging
Our active Sun in 45 minutes Ha animation: full disk and very active prominences, Rick Veregin

Our active Sun in 45 minutes Ha animation: full disk and very active prominences

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

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Description

This image used brightness inversion on the solar disk, thus both prominences on the limb and surface (the latter are called filaments) will appear bright, as will surface sunspots.
•    The most active and largest prominences are in the north polar region at the top, but there are other smaller prominences scattered around the solar limb. 
•    There are some short-lived bursts in the filaments at 7 and 8 o’clock near the southern limb at the bottom that last less than 15 minutes. 
•    There are some very large filaments on the surface too, though they are not that active.

My animation of 25 frames was created from images taken on August 18th over 45 minutes. The individual frames of the animation were all from 75 second SER videos at 1520x1520 pixels in 16 bit mono (the camera is 14 bit) taken at 24  fps. Each video was separated by a delay of 115 seconds, so the animation cycle is 3 minutes. The resulting 1780 frames were stacked in Autostakkert as the best 25%, so just over 440 frames were used in each of the final animation frames. Each animation frame was then wavelet sharpened with Registax. Curves and brightness adjustments, the surface inversion, color and the animation were all done in Photoshop.

Tip on frame rates. I had been struggling to get the vendor quoted fps when actually imaging, itw as always way less than the preview speed, and very quickly overfilled the buffer. The problem was my acquisition laptop had only 8 Gbytes of memory, most of which was used up by the OS and other background programs (despite turning as many off as possible). I was thus limited by my disk speed, which was insufficient even though it was a relatively new SSD. My new laptop has 16 Gbytes of memory, a fast SSD, and a short USB3 cable I now get the best fps possible with my camera, with room to spare.

For those that missed my previous posts, I’m including again my

Layman’s guide to the “Top 10 things to see in Solar Ha.”
In white light we only see the Sun’s 6000 Kelvin photosphere “landscape”, consisting of:
•    Darker, cooler sunspots
•    Granulation, consisting of hotter and brighter rising; and cooler and darker sinking convention cells, like boiling porridge.
•    Faculae, bright hot patches of concentrated magnetic flux.

It is the chromosphere that shows up In Ha, as we block out the Photosphere’s overwhelming white light. The chromosphere is a much hotter, 2000 km thick layer, lying above the Photosphere. With temperatures rising to 17000 K, the chromosphere efficiently excites hydrogen to produce Ha emission. 
The chromosphere shows a very different “landscape” than the Photosphere:
•    Spicules, tiny bright spikes, form a 3,000-10,000 km layer of bright fuzz on the Sun’s limb, and darker spikes on the solar disk. They are dark on the disk as they are cooler than the chromosphere below them. Few last more than 15 min, but the Sun has 100s of thousands of them at any one time.
•    Fibrils are tiny low contrast darker filament-like structures. 
•    Dark Mottles, comprised of fibrils and spicules, blanket the entire disk. 
•    Field Transition Arches are groups of longer fibrils that join areas of opposite magnetic polarity.
•    Prominences loop out from the limb: these are glowing, but cooler, hydrogen gas lifted from the Sun by magnetic fields. Prominences rise 100s of thousands of km above the hotter chromosphere.
•    Filaments are the darker clouds that seem to float on the solar disk. Filaments are prominences, appearing darker because they are cooler and higher, extending above the hotter chromosphere below them.
•    Plage (French for beach) are irregular, bright patches on the solar disk, found around active regions. They mark nearly vertical emerging or reconnecting magnetic fields and can last several days.
•    Ellerman bombs (named for the astronomer who studied them) are tiny, brighter spots that fluctuate in brightness, associated with large plage.
•    Flares show a brightening within a sunspot group, often with a “comb-like” flow.  They last from a few minutes to hours and change in both intensity and area as you watch.
•    Sunspot umbrae are the dark cores of sunspots, much like what is seen in white light. However, sunspot penumbrae branch out into whirls consisting of fibrils and spicules. 

Bonus, not in the Top 10, because it is difficult to observe:
•    The Chromospheric Network is outlined by filigree, which are very tiny bright spots that are less than 1 arc-second in size, and best observed off-band of Ha.
Note that it is common to invert light and dark on the solar surface, which provides improved contrast for the solar disk, and a better brightness match to the fainter prominences. It also has the advantage that the otherwise dark filaments on the surface (which are prominences) are now bright, matching the bright prominences at the limb.

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