Contains:  Solar system body or event
Floating Solar Prominence in Ha: “The Lobster Claw”, Rick Veregin

Floating Solar Prominence in Ha: “The Lobster Claw”

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging
Floating Solar Prominence in Ha: “The Lobster Claw”, Rick Veregin

Floating Solar Prominence in Ha: “The Lobster Claw”

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

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Acquisition details

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Description

End of Life for Quiescent Prominence?
When I saw this amazing floating prominence, “The Lobster Claw”, it appeared to me that this might be near the end of life for a large quiescent prominence (a quiet region filament or QRF). While these prominences are relatively long lived, they are not totally stable. So, toward the end of the quiescent phase, if they rise more than 50,000 km above the surface, they will generally break loose from the Sun in a few days at most. This is a "Disparition Brusque" or sudden vanishing. These type of eruptions usually last only  one or two hours. They prominence may then just fade, as the magnetic field lines weaken, or there may be a spectacular "lifting off", where the prominence rises and drifts away from the sun, slowly breaking up in the process as the magnetic fields become too weak.

GONG chronology
However, this event seems unusual. I did some searching to the history of this apparition on GONG searching the jpegs (I had no luck downloading the fits files, they all seem empty in my downloads. If anyone has any ideas why, please let me know.).  This prominence first appeared at about 0 UT on June 12. About 8 hours later it seemed to be floating above the surface, where it remained on the 13th AM when I observed it between 14 to 16 UT. On the 14th it was no longer floating, but was lower in the chromosphere and clearly connected to the Sun. And finally on the 15th is just suddenly disappeared. 

My observations
In my image you can see some sign of a connection to the Sun, there are faint trails up to it from the Sun, delineating the magnetic field lines holding it in place. Also, moving toward the Sun, at an angle upward, you can see material in 4 faint streams falling back into the Sun. I wish I could have followed it longer, but clouds intervened. The floating prominence has amazing detail in it, which I do see in the GONG images, though the jpegs don’t have great resolution.
In the end, clearly this was end of life for a QRF, it was probably close to breaking away, but still connected and ultimately the gravity and magnetic fields pulled it back in, then the field lines collapsed back into the Sun.

Capture details
I created this animation from SER 16 bit videos with 10 ms exposures (gain 200), each of which were taken with 15 seconds duration at about 75 fps. The result was about 1100 frames for each video, which were stacked in Autostakkert, taking 15% of the frames at  1.5X drizzle. I would have taken a higher % frames as seeing was excellent (45 mm of rain in 24 hours adds a lot of humidity and stability to the air), but there were nuisance wisps of clouds going through, so I wanted to make sure I only got the best images.  All stacks were lightly processed in Registax, as I did not need much sharpening. In Photoshop I did a curves adjustment to make the overexposed core black, and a Halpha red coloration to mimic a solar eclipse look. The animation gif was done in Photoshop. The videos are separated by 1 minute in real time, so the final gif animation runs over 18 frames and 18 minutes.

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