Today is Saturday, and guess what time I woke up? Just after 4AM. I woke up thinking I had to go to work... Ah well, it is what it is. Tried to get back to sleep, but to no avail. Took a look outside, but no stars/planets visible due to cloud cover. Still, there was no humidity and a nice 66F/19C outside. Time for coffee...
Got on here for a bit, heard the
My wife woke up and informed me she was going to go for groceries. Always a good thing. I had some leftover chicken for breakfast, and as I was doing so, my teenage daughter unit woke up She had something to eat and went upstairs. I went back downstairs and checked the forecast and Spaceweather.com. It informed me there was a new spot, AR2864, and what looked from the image of a new spot(s) forming above and to the left. As far as my forecast, not too promising. Oh well.
Mum got home with the groceries, and then Sarah and I went to the local mall. She needed a new phone charging cable, and I haven't been in a dollar store in ages.
We both like to make things. I've taught her basic welding using my MIG. I do all the muscle work (clamping, bending) and then have her do the weld. I've taught her the settings for the thickness of the metal being welded, wire stick-out, angle of the weld, etc. I'd love to see what she could do with a TIG. She is her fathers child for sure! As a side note, she took a shop class in her last year before Covid shut that down, and her final mark was 97.7%. She was top in her class and one of three girls in a class of 27. I was wearing a grin for weeks and so was she. As her father, I am a lucky man
We took a look in the cutlery part of the dollar store, as it's amazing the things you can weld together from spoons, forks and the like. We ended up buying some ladles, salad spoons, and skewers after we had a shared idea.
Her and I got in about 10:30, and spent some quality time together. We had a lot of fun making this. The top starts off looking like some cutesy anime character, then it just goes Freddy Kruger lower down It's 18 inches/46cm's tall with an average 12 ounce beer can for scale.
Between it all and lunch, this took us to about 2PM. Nice. Sarah bid me farewell for now and went in to her room to socialize with friends, and I cleaned up outside. By this time, the clouded-out Sun was clearing our tree through the clouds. I went in, and when I came back out half an hour later, I had a clear blue sky. That was not part of today's forecast...
Opportunity sometimes knocks pretty loudly, and this was on of those times. Once again, ran downstairs, scope, filter and camera, run upstairs to the shed for the mount and set it all up. Not even two minutes. And yet in that short time frame, the clouds were already billowing in from the west. I managed to take 22 out of 40 shots before the cloud wisps started in the frames.
I used my C80-HD and Canon EOS 550D at ISO 100 and 1/250th sec exp in Monochrome mode. I ran the 22 shots through PIPP, and took the first 10 to stack with AS3, as the quality of them was all above 99.8%.
Out of those 10, I stacked 25%. So what's that; 2 1/2 pictures? Well, maybe sometimes less is better
After I was satisfied with all that, I ran the stack through ImPPG, and did some mild tweaking with the
This morning when I checked Spaceweather.com, there were two identified spots, as well an an un yet numbered group above.
Well, when I processed my pics, it was quite a different story. It's fun to be ahead of the game... The Sun is literally exploding in spots! Depending on how they form and how the NOAA labels them, there could be a minimum of four or more in the next day or so. Here's the images:
Full size image here
Some annotation for the left side of the disc:
Full size image here
And one for the right. This is just forming, and no, it is not AR2860; that disappeared from our field of view yesterday:
Full size image here
After that we had dinner, as it was supposed to rain early tonight, and sure enough it did and still is.
I'm looking at rain all night tonight and clouded out tomorrow according to my forecast, but Monday looks good!
I hope you fare better than I. Thanks for reading and have a great night/day!!
All the best,