AR2751... ??

[Thefatkitty]

Afternoon (for me) all, hope your day is going well.

Today is Sunday and I didn't go to see Sunny, my canine "charge" today; her owners have gone to Seattle for a month and she's with one of the kids for the month of November. Too bad; it started out as a very sunny day!

I was actually fairly nice out compared to the previous four days or so. After being out with my Sears 60mm last night, I wanted to take advantage of some clear skies. Time to see what the Sun is up to. I had noticed on Friday that there was a up and coming spot (first in 28 days), which turned into AR2750 on Saturday. Today, AR2750 is gone, and now there's AR2751. OK then....

Being up at 8AM, I had some time for some coffee and breakfast. At 10:30, the Sun was to the south-east, the sky was fairly clear (few clouds going about), so I decided to try to get a pic of AR2751.

I used my C80-HD at f/11.4, Baader solar film, and my Canon T3 at ISO 100 and 1/640th second exposure for all shots. As I started this, the clouds started getting wispy, so out of 110 shots, 22 were clear. Stacked those with PIPP, then Autostakkert2 and finally ImPPG with some sharpening in Gimp.

First off, this is a link to the SpaceWeather.com Sun picture for today: https://spaceweather.com/images2019/03nov19/hmi1898.gif. OK, so now you can see the spot (or spots).

This is the stacked image I took:

Sun_03-11-2019_AR2751_01.png

Huh? Where is it? Good question. So what I did was copy the image from Spaceweather, and opened it in PSP 9. I then opened my image, resized the one from Spaceweather so it was sized to mine, copied it, then pasted it onto my image as a layer.
By adjusting the layers, I was able to figure out where it should be, provided the time and location for both are about the same.... It's in the green box. I know, I really don't see it either

Sun_03-11-2019_AR2751_02.png

And there you have it. I also decided to use Gimp to give the image a blue highlight. That's just me wishing I had a Calcium filter, though.....

Sun_03-11-2019_AR2751_03.png

Solar minimum. We've already beaten out 2008 for percentage of days without a spot, and the year's not even done yet. Wonder when the next spot will be, or are we headed for another Maunder Minimum??

All the best and have a good day,

[Lady Fraktor]

I think Spaceweather has started posting these ones from wishful thinking, probably dust on a lens

[bladekeeper]

Well, nice images, but man, that must be one tiny little spot!

If it gets any more minimaler things are going to just stop.

Glad to see you got some sun time in, Mark!

[Juno16]

Spots or not, you sure shot incredibly sharp images Mark!

Great focus and granulation details
,

Thanks,
Jim

[Hankmeister3]

We might have to target ol' Sol with a 50 megaton nuclear device in order to jump start sunspots again! "Nuke it from orbit … just to be sure!" (from the movie, "Aliens")

Unfortunately, to catch the Mercury transit of the Sun this Monday morning, I would have to travel five hours to the southwest to escape the cloud cover that is presently blanketing the American midwest. I haven't the energy to do that despite the fact this may be the last opportunity I ever have to capture a Mercury transit. So somebody do me proud here at TSS, okay!