Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Nice Lift Off Today

We're back in the office !!!

I hope everyone had a chance to view the Sun at would be about 2:30 thru 3:30PM (Arizona Time).

A very nice prominence has been evolving all day, swirling and changing shapes. I have been testing since early this morning and have really enjoyed watching the transformations. I suspect that this is a precursor to an active region that is going to be rotating around in the next day or so :)

At about 3:oopm, it lifted off the surface and continued to move further and further away. I was amazed at how far it was from the Sun's surface, and yet was still very bright.

Upon setting up an LS60T/PT, I was able to see why.

An extremely thin tail was still "feeding" the cloud from the surface. By rotating the PT, you could actually follow the tail from the surface of the Sun thru the sky and into the suspended cloud of gas.

At 3:30pm I noted that the tail had broken, and as you would suspect, the gas cooled quickly.

It is certainly a reminder of the "good old days" that are quickly coming back, and we are all looking forward to the decade of 2010 which will be better known as the decade of Solar Maximum..

Lots of blogs to get entered. I am just finishing up the Community Area of the new site and will be importing the current blogs into the new format.

Some very exciting news is brewing for the solar enthusiast, so keep posted to the news and events section which will now be updated every few days..

1 comment:

  1. Hi,

    I did mange to capture some video of the Sun back on the 2nd... please see:

    http://www.caelumobservatory.com/outgoing/release/sunspots/sunspot.html

    Happy New Year,
    Adam Block

    ReplyDelete