Contains:  Solar system body or event
Solar Ha alpha: 75 minute animation including two flares and a floating prominence, Rick Veregin

Solar Ha alpha: 75 minute animation including two flares and a floating prominence

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging
Solar Ha alpha: 75 minute animation including two flares and a floating prominence, Rick Veregin

Solar Ha alpha: 75 minute animation including two flares and a floating prominence

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

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Warning: This is a large animation file, may be slow to load. Please zoom in to see details, there is a lot of detail in such a big file.

My Animation
Surface features are inverted light to dark, so surface filaments (prominences) are light, and bright areas and flares are dark. This provides better contrast, but also means prominences everywhere, surface and limb, are bright. 

Please zoom in there is lots of detail in my image. For your treasure hunt on this image, you need to find:
1)    Floating prominence, hanging well above the solar surface, suspended by incredible magnetic fields, it is about 6:30 in orientation.
2)    The bright flare on the limb at about 2 O’Clock, it lasts less than six minutes. I don’t think this can be a prominence, in this polar region the prominences are quiescent, so they last a long time, even a full solar rotation.
3)    There is a sunspot at about 4:30, which inverted here appears white. Just to the left look for a dark line that appears then dies back, it lasts less than 10 minutes, just a few frames. This is also a flare, appearing black due to my inversion. 
4)    There are a number of other active prominences around the limb, so look out for those.
5)    Finally, a minor thing, notice the slow rotation of our Sun, from Left to Right in my animation.

This video of 21 frames was imaged on August 9th over 75 minutes. The individual frames of the animation were all from 105 second SER videos at 2400x2400 pixels in 8 -bit mono at 23 fps, with a delay of 105 seconds. The 8-bit mono was a mistake, but thankfully 8-bit is usable, but it just makes processing a real challenge. Do not use 8 bit mono if you want to capture the solar disk and prominences, it is not easy that way! I stacked 20% of 2400 images in Autostakkert at 1.5X drizzle, followed by wavelet sharpening with Registax. The final gif was produced in Photoshop, including adding color, and was reduced in size back to 1X so that it would load faster.

For those that missed my it, I’m including:
My Layman’s Guide to the Top 10 things to see in Solar Ha.


Note light will be dark for surface features when inverted.

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.

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    Solar Ha alpha: 75 minute animation including two flares and a floating prominence, Rick Veregin
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Description: Mono version without any coloration

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