28th March: H-alpha sketch and observation

[Qualia]

The more one views the Sun the more one realises that all the events witnessed on the Sun are unique and will never be repeated exactly. This week the Sun has put on quite a display, not only in terms of the active regions but perhaps more notably in the erupting prominences.

Today was no less gorgeous. A Saturday Sun, on a breezeless 30ºC deep blue sky morning. The latest active region looks fantastic; a small collection of sunsports and pores amid a network of plages, framed by seemingly delicate filament strokes. There was also another more delicate active region in the upper north-west of the Sun while slightly above it on the limb was a gorgeous arch of plasma. Several gouts of plasma levitated over the solar limb while at around 4 o'clock, a huge prominence had erupted throwing its hot plasma some 100,000km into the higher regions of the Sun's atmosphere.

Once again, the sketch was made with chalks on black paper.

[jkwhinfrey]

Lucky man. No sun for me today, just wind, clouds and occasional rain. And I'm supposed to be doing a public outreach event tonight :-0

I do find your renditions of the Sun in chalk interesting. They've got a warm feeling to them I can almost feel, which is especially appreciated on a day like this. I've noticed you're using a Delos rather than the ortho. Apart from the magnification/FOV can you see much of a difference in quality or detail?

James

[Pig]

These sketches are very realistic Rob   I knew we would get some crackers from you.

[Qualia]

Hiya James,

Thank you for your kind words and I'm sorry to hear you're not getting the weather today. It has been quite grim here in Spain, but this week and next looks rather settled. The days have been warm and clear and the nights on a similar footing.

I'm only just setting out but I think each time I sit with the Sun to sketch, I'm learning something new. To be honest, I don't think the Delos helps me when working with the Sun. For night time viewing with the 10" it is my favourite eyepiece (along with the 14mm) but when working with for the Sun, I find it a heavy, lumpy chunk of glass . The quality of view is on par with the Orthos but I just prefer using the smaller, lighter eyepieces; the 12.5mm Ortho being my favourite in terms of power and contrast and field of view etc. Curiously, I don't like working with the TV Plossls but have found it a pleasure to view the Sun with a 24mm Panoptic. There's only 20x magnification, but just like the Moon or Jupiter, sometimes observing with a lower power is equally as pleasing. 

With this kind of pattern, I wonder what a 12mm or 10mm Radian would be like?

- - - -

Shaun, you're a gentlemen and very kind. I still need to work but each day something new is learnt

P.S: As agreed, the fiver is in the post for all these nice things you say

[nightfisher]

Who needs imaging gear when pens and pencils can achieve this level of detail, rob this is amazing 

[Ruud]

Oh yes, that is a really nice sketch. I love it.

Temperatures here, by the way, are struggling to get out of the single digit range. And it is wet and windy too.

[Qualia]

Jules and Ruud, thank you for you thoughtful messages I know my sketches are not very good, and there's no need to say otherwise    but your kind words certainly inspire me to try better.

[Stu]

Excellent sketch Rob. I'm wanting to see it at high res as the image I see has loads of compression artifacts hidinguch of the detail. Is there anyway of getting a better res image up?

Cheers

[Qualia]

Thanks Stu, and thank you for the very constructive insight. The original to what you see on the computer is different. At the moment I'm scanning in colour with 600ppp. The highest my printer allows is 1200 but I've never used that. I will give today's sketch a scan and see whether anything improvves.

[Stu]

Rob, it may well be more to do with the forum software compressing the image, can you link to it somewhere else at the 600 dpi?

[Qualia]

I can send you a JPG file via email, Stu. Would that be better?

[Stu]

Sounds good, will pm you my email