AR 1176

Following my last post, I was hoping the fine weather would last long enough to allow me to capture the developing active region 1176 as it moved across the disk.  How optimistic was I?!

So, with the attempt aborted after only 3 days, here's another post showing the developing sunspot group as it moved away from the limb.

Unfortunately, the sky today was a bit hazier due to the approaching front, which messed up the image clarity slightly compared to the earlier shots, but I've done my best to get the contrast and hue the same for all 3 images.  The result, whilst not as good as I'd hoped, is quite pleasing and shows the changing aspect of the spot group reasonably well. A larger image scale on the camera sensor would allow me to capture more detail. When I eventually get my scope out of hibernation, I must try and hook the DSLR up, giving me a focal length of 1600mm, instead of the current 420mm. That should hopefully spice things up a bit!

Sun - 23rd March 2011

A while since I've taken any images of our nearest star so, blessed with some decent weather, I thought I'd capture a few images.
This shot is a 10 image stack taken with my trusty D300 and 420mm telephoto.

Active region 1175 is starting to creep behind the limb; no discernible sunspots are visible, but there is some nice faculae. Meanwhile, AR1176 is beginning to show itself on the opposite side of the disk, with some interesting spot development amidst the faculae. This group has the potential to grow into something quite large, so will be interesting to track it's progress as it crosses the solar disk. Hopefully we'll be granted a few days continued clear skies before the cloud rolls in.

23rd March. AR1175 & AR1176

Perigee Moon

To the unaided eye, the full moon at perigee is, despite media hype, not noticeably larger than any "average" full moon. Never the less, it was interesting to observe as it climbed above the horizon, falsely coloured and slightly oblated due to it's low altitude, and to capture a few images of the event for the record. 
Without a useful point of reference to compare the image to, of course, the apparent 14% increase in diameter is largely meaningless.  What would be much more interesting would be to capture an image of a similar phase moon when it is at apogee, and to composite the images. This would enable a more meaningful and interesting size comparison.  So, I have the perigee image, now when is the next full moon at apogee.....?



Perigee.  19th March 2011