Is it me or the sun?

[Floater]

Looking at old Sol again today and, while still quieter to my eye than some days ago, there was a large prominence back (around 8 o'clock in my view) where there had been a huge M-shaped prom before.

This prompts questions:

1. Is this a resurgence of activity in this area? Something which subsided for a bit then blew up/out again?

2. Was it a change in seeing conditions which made everything only appear to be quieter yesterday? Or, and heaven forfend, of course -

3. Was it because of 'operator error'?! Had I not tuned the etalon effectively yesterday, or correctly brought things into focus, or even some mistake that I can't guess at?

Would more experienced observers care to comment and/or advise, please? Don't worry, I view everything as part of the learning process and I'm quite willing to be told that I am ignorant, careless or even stupid. (Hopefully, responders would go gently on that last one ... )

Grateful for any constructive input.

[JB80]

The Sun is H-alpha is a hugely dynamic beast, the changes on the surface and with proms and filaments can be played out it just a few hours. Sometimes even minutes for a big lift off event.

http://halpha.nso.edu/

This website it a excellent one to monitor and check if what you are seeing matches with them.

It could be just the changes on the Sun from day to day.

[Stu]

Don't forget that the sun is rotating too. The rotational period is around 25 days, so I guess that means features take around 12 days to transit the disk from when they first appear on the limb.

The prominences are associated with the Active Regions which follow this rotation. When they are on the edge, eruptions from them appear as prominences, when over the surface, they appear as darker filaments. If there are no AR's on the limb then there won't be any prominences even though the sun is still active.

One thing I like about white light viewing in parallel with Ha is that there is a tremendous amount of detail visible in the AR's in white light, more than in a PST, so you get a nice balance of the overall activity.

In general the sun seems very active currently.

Stu

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