Yesterday was alright weather-wise, threat of clouds and mist not far away. Today it has been the clearest sunshine I've seen for what seems like many months. 2012 was just wall to wall cloud and rain, the start of 2013 has not been much better, but hopefully the weather patterns are now changing for spring now that it's mid-February.

I had a few hours outside with the Lunt LS60 today, enjoyed using my telescope and seeing the sun, even if there was a bit of a thin cloud streak (probably from multiple high-altitude vapor trails) obscuring it. The view through the eyepiece on the Lunt LS60 showed the sun surrounded by a dim red glow, but with a bit of tuning and focusing the prominences and filaments were all there to see, and quite clear too so the seeing must be good.

There were two main prominences on the top part (as seen through the eyepiece), one seemed to be the tail end of something that was just lingering in space, the other was quite a beefy looking blast with plenty of matter visible. Both of these didn't appear to change much at all over the period of about two hours as I observed on and off while pottering around in the sunshine.

A very large, long filament stretched from around the centre towards the upper limb.

Just as a side note regarding glasses, I have recently got reactions fitted to my main pair and soon realised that these and solar observing don't mix very well (sitting outdoors when the sun is out tends to turn them dark!), I thought I would be able to use my old glasses which are still close enough to my current prescription, but discovered it's actually much better to just go without glasses at all and focus to my eye. My sight is not too bad without glasses anyway, I only need them for distance, so this works well. I suspect this works much better than for night time observing as it's a different type of image I'm viewing, but I will have to try it out again the next time I'm out on a clear night.

A good session all-round which makes me feel like I'm getting the most out of my investment.