November 23, 2015: Another H-alpha tea break

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Had a look at the sun with some students during my morning tea break, and the disk and proms are a bit more quiet today. The new AR spotted on the eastern limb yesterday has moved further on disk: a dark sunspot trailing a small but bright plage area. The larger AR that preceded it is still going strong, showing big sunspots with a lot of bright plage around it. The sunspots in the AR nearer the western limb seem to have shrunk, and it didn't show in the solar binoculars in white light.  By contrast, the surrounding plage area is bright as ever, and shows up as an area of faculae even in the 8x32 solar binoculars. Nearby, a few flat partly disconnected arches can be seen on the western limb. The larger but quite hazy filament in the southwest is still there. Clouds are now moving in, so I fear that will be the last report for a while.

[paulastro]

Many thanks Michael, a great description.  I took a few snaps of a VERY hazy Sun this morning, in fact I thought it was probably a waste of time.  In turns out that on a couple of them there is a little detail and I'm going to try processing them just to see what sort of drawing I can produce from the two processed snaps.  I'll then compare them with a GONG image grabbed at the time but which I haven't looked at.  It will be interesting to see if my drawings bears any resemblance to reality when I compare it to the GONG grab.  If so it will be amazing  in such terrible conditions. 

All good fun and it will give me something to do until I next have some Sun, probably Wednesday looking at the forecast.