Sunspots 2835 and 2836 6/29/2021 (Steve Lantz)

Sunspots 2835 and 2836 6/29/2021

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

I finally got a partial break in the cloud cover to image sunspots 2835 (upper left) and 2836 (lower right). This was my first try with a Baader continuum solar filter. I had to shoot through thin to not-so-thin clouds and this compromised the image quality. Nonetheless, I could see that the Baader filter improved the results. I really only had one video of about 170 frames that was useful; stacking with Registax wouldn't work because of the clouds passing through, so I manually selected the 15 best frames and stacked them. I had to pull every image processing trick I knew of to get rid of some of the problems caused by the clouds.

SpaceWeather.com reports today (6/30/2021) that sunspot 2835 may be heading for a major flare event. In general, sunspots are caused by solar magnetic field lines that get pushed through the photosphere in the form of tube-like structures called flux tubes that have parallel field lines; the sunspots occur in pairs (not necessarily equally prominent) in which one sunspot has a magnetic polarity that is the opposite of the other. If a flux tube of one polarity gets pushed into another of the opposite polarity, magnetic reconnection can occur, which is a very energetic event. This is presently occurring in sunspot 2835; the result is an Ellerman bomb -- a magnetic explosion of immense proportion. One Ellerman bomb can be as powerful as 100,000 atomic bombs like those in the World War II era. Phillipe Tosi imaged dozens of these explosions in sunspot 2835 on the same day that I took my image; his image is presented in today's SpaceWeather report. When this kind of activity starts occurring in sunspots, it is often a precursor to a flare event.

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