Massive Solar Prominence 6-February 2022

[RonAM]

Many images of the recent solar prominence have been posted to many sites in the last few days. It extends a distance similar to the diameter of Jupiter from the solar limb. Sunday afternoon the skies briefly cleared of clouds here in the Midwest US. Etalons don’t hold tuning well in our current cold weather so I captured this image from inside an upstairs bedroom through the window. That’s never a good idea for dark sky objects but it worked well for the sun.

The scope is a 40mm Coronado Solarmax II double stack to ZWO ASI294MC pro camera on Ioptron skytracker pro mount. Polar alignment was roughly set via compass for azimuth and clinometer for altitude, free tracking at solar rate.

A 30-second exposure in SharpCap at gain of 245 and 10.9ms per frame provided a 1006 frame SER video to process. I set the red to a very low value in SharpCap to convert the typical deep red H-Alpha color to a more normal solar hue, key to this image in my opinion.

Processing involved the planetary processing taught by David Richards in a simple form using PIPP, Autostakkert and Registax 6 first two wavelet layers set to about 120 sharpen, 25 denoise at 100%. The final step was a hue adjustment in Digital Photo Professional to reduce green and increase yellow via the main single hue slider control.

I’m very happy with the result and visual resolution given it is through a window with 40mm aperture. I credit SharpCap, ZWO, and the processing programs.

[turfpit]

That turned out well Ron, especially since taken from inside. Always satisfying to hear that one of my documents was useful to someone. Thanks.

Dave

[RonAM]

Thanks Dave for the kind comments and especially for your tutorial on processing.

Many are enjoying how easy it can be to develop better final images, provided their input videos are of a quality to do so.

All the best, Ron

[timh]

That is a great capture! It doesn't entirely look like a 'loop' but looks more complicated than that with several loops and a region that looks like it might break away? Did it lead to a coronal ejection in the end ? I just wondered how dynamic these things are and how your picture compares with others taken on different days?

Tim

[RonAM]

Thanks Tim,

Apparently this one changed quite rapidly as prominences are concerned. A site I use to monitor what’s going on in real time is the US National Solar Observatory:

gong2.nso.edu

and of course Spaceweather.com

Although the latter only updates daily.

A long duration CME hit Earth from a sunspot group that emitted around the time this prominence was at its maximum so maybe related. It’s reported the CME took out 40 starlink satellites.

The nso site had a no-color image that looked just like mine for the shape of the prominence afternoon Feb 6 which is what prompted me to set up the scope & try to capture it. By the next morning it’s shape was quite different.

All the best- Ron

[timh]

Thanks Ron
I wasn't even aware of the spaceweather site -- interesting to read there that quite a small CME triggered a chain of events that caused a number ofd starlink satellites to de-orbit!
Tim

[RonAM]

Check the nso site images via the link: Many new prominences are developing, and one has a similar appearance to the one I posted.