The Sun Jan. 16th

[Thefatkitty]

Hey everyone, hope all is well with you and yours

Haven't been on here much of late; been a busy few days. I even went to work yesterday; it was a nice -30C (-22F). Fun times that.

It was very clear last night, but with the temperature now at -35C (-31F), I chose to not sit out in that. BTW, if you're wondering, Fahrenheit and Celsius "meet" at -40.

Today I slept in till 9AMish, and it was still clear out but much warmer; -3C (26F). Hmmm. I checked Spaceweather.com, and there was some activity on the Sun, as has been the norm lately.

Where I live at this time of year, the Sun doesn't rise more than 25 degrees above the horizon. Not the best time to image, even with the cold and clear skies. Also, this shortens my "window" for taking pictures, what with the roof and the neighbours tree. It is what it is.

Between 10 and 10:30 is basically my only window in the morning, and about 2:15 to 3 in the afternoon, and it was supposed to start getting cloudy after lunch. Well, it's now or never. I took out my C80-HD with its Baader solar film to let it cool off. 30 minutes later, I set it up on my CG4 and used my Canon EOS 550D at ISO 100 and 1/200th sec exp. I took 20 pictures, and took everything inside. My wonderful wife was making breakfast (pancakes) and we have some maple syrup I received from one of my clients over the holidays; he makes it from the trees on his property. A one litre bottle to boot, and yes; breakfast was delicious!

Once breakfast was done, I came downstairs, stretched out on the couch and fell asleep After the two hour "old man" nap, I processed my images.

I used PIPP for cropping/aligning, AutoStakkert 3 for stacking the best 50%, ImPPG for some RL de-convolution and Photoshop CS6 for processing. Yes, CS6. I'm running Linux Mint 20.2 "Uma", and this is the latest version of PS it will run using WINE and PlayOnLinux. I bought CS6 in late 2012 before the whole "creative cloud" thing, so I know it well. And for what I image (solar and lunar) it suffices quite well for what I do, at least to me.

So here is today's Sun with the planets to scale:

Full size image here



The same image, except with annotations for the spots. The one with the question marks has yet to labelled for some reason :

And just for fun, this is sunspot AR2929 with the Earth to scale:

AR2929.jpg (41.95 KiB) Viewed 1330 times

Well, that's it for me. I have a few emails/PM's to get back to as well as dinner. All this sleeping makes me hungry And we're supposed to get 20cm's (~8 inches) of snow tonight into the morning. If that happens, I'm not at work tomorrow.

Hope you have a good night/day!

All the best,

[messier 111]

very nice report and pics , merci mon ami .

[Lady Fraktor]

It looks like you took good advantage of your limited window, a nice image

We are supposed to be getting another 20 cm of snow today as well. Would you like the 140 km/h wind gusts as well?

[Juno16]

Your writing and images are too notch Mark!

I really like the annotations and planet size comparison.

Man, you world is so much different than mine. It’s a frigid 35°F this morning which is only a few degrees C. It doesn’t get much colder here. Almost never any snow maybe every 10 to 15 years.
I grew up in the northern part of the country and as a kid. I froze and played all the time in the snow. It was normal then.
I guess everybody’s normal is different.

Thanks Mark for the write up, and visualizations. Both photographically, and mentally.

Take care buddy