White light solar - 22nd Feb 2022

[Stu]

Some nice clear skies and the wind had dropped quite a bit, so I popped out with the FC76DCU which is always on standby (in the lounge 😉).

The seeing was better today than yesterday, and I got some very nice views of the two main ARs 12954 and 12955. They are very classic looking oval spots with well defined umbral and penumbral regions and were surrounded by lovely faculae.

AR 12953 was also visible as a string of small spots, but that was about it, apart from a few more patches of faculae.

The granulation doesn’t ‘pop’ as clearly in this scope via the FC100DC, but still when the seeing settled it was quite clear, with swirls and knots showing up around the ARs. I always find it most vivid towards the centre portions of the disk where you are looking straight into the granulation cells.

Anyway, I took some handheld shots, just through one channel of the binoviewer using ProCam 8 and processed in PS Express. I found a way of using the Raw image and it processed better than I expected.