Plage Progression Through Cycle 24

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Carbon60
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Plage Progression Through Cycle 24

Post by Carbon60 »

I am indebted to Mark T for all of his wonderful Ca II K image data throughout the entire cycle, so everything that follows is based on his work.

Thanks, Mark.

What I've done is simply measure the amount of light coloured plage on the solar disk (as a percentage of total disk area) as a function of time to illustrate the ebb and flow of plage over the entire 24th cycle. For this I used a program called Image J and set the upper and lower lightness thresholds for each individual image in order to isolate the regions of interest (light coloured plage). It isn't perfect and it would be nice to have a plug-in specifically for this type of analysis, correcting for the foreshortening of the features closer to the edge of the disk, but given that all of the images suffer from this same 'aberration' then maybe it isn't too important anyhow.

Here's an example of one of Mark's images with the threshold gate applied. The plage regions are shown in green. Basically Image J returns the percentage of pixels in green over the whole image (including the black background). Setting the lower threshold to exclude the black background now turns the black to blue and Image J returns the percentage of the image pixels that are below this threshold. A simple calculation allows the green pixel population to be obtained from the entire population of pixels on the disk, excluding the background.

20140428.jpg
20140428.jpg (159.41 KiB) Viewed 1808 times
This is the resulting plot over time from 2010 until the present
Plot.jpg
Plot.jpg (98.56 KiB) Viewed 1808 times
which is in pretty good agreement with the predictions for cycle 24 shown below (red line):
Solar_cycle_24_sunspot_number_progression_and_prediction2.gif
Solar_cycle_24_sunspot_number_progression_and_prediction2.gif (37.44 KiB) Viewed 1808 times
and the official sunspot counts for cycle 24:
Solar_cycle_24_sunspot_number_progression_and_prediction.gif
Solar_cycle_24_sunspot_number_progression_and_prediction.gif (17.25 KiB) Viewed 1810 times
Here are some of Mark's images from various periods over this cycle.

2010
CaK_FD_20100912.jpg
CaK_FD_20100912.jpg (20.04 KiB) Viewed 1810 times
2014
CaK_FD_20140428.jpg
CaK_FD_20140428.jpg (639.23 KiB) Viewed 1810 times
2015
cak-full-disk-colour 20150216.jpg
cak-full-disk-colour 20150216.jpg (321.11 KiB) Viewed 1808 times
2016
cak-full-disk-colour 20161119.jpg
cak-full-disk-colour 20161119.jpg (87.94 KiB) Viewed 1810 times
and 2018
cak-full-disk-colour 20180224.jpg
cak-full-disk-colour 20180224.jpg (74.6 KiB) Viewed 1810 times
It will be interesting to continue this type of analysis during cycle 25 to mark its progress over the coming years.

Thanks for looking.

Stu.


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More images at http://www.flickr.com/photos/solarcarbon60/
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Re: Plage Progression Through Cycle 24

Post by Valery »

Thanks, Stue and Mark

Really titanic work!


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Re: Plage Progression Through Cycle 24

Post by Starry Jack »

That is an amazing and heavy lift. Well done sir.


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Re: Plage Progression Through Cycle 24

Post by marktownley »

That's way cool Stu! Like the method too!


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Re: Plage Progression Through Cycle 24

Post by MAURITS »

Thanks for the effort.


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Re: Plage Progression Through Cycle 24

Post by bart1805 »

Really interesting Stu, what a nice project! Thanks, Bart.


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Re: Plage Progression Through Cycle 24

Post by MapleRidge »

Awesome work and analysis of the images Stu...very impressive :bow

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Re: Plage Progression Through Cycle 24

Post by Montana »

That sure is a good project, fantastic results too, well done to you both :bow :bow :bow a very enjoyable read.

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Re: Plage Progression Through Cycle 24

Post by Carbon60 »

Many thanks, everyone. We can look at building up a similar database during cycle 25. It will take a while :)

Stu.


H-alpha, WL and Ca II K imaging kit for various image scales.
Fluxgate Magnetometers (1s and 150s Cadence).
Radio meteor detector.
More images at http://www.flickr.com/photos/solarcarbon60/
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Re: Plage Progression Through Cycle 24

Post by pedro »

Impressive work Stu, well done


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Re: Plage Progression Through Cycle 24

Post by ffellah »

A very interesting and well thought out analysis. Thank you both, Stu and Mark.

Franco


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Re: Plage Progression Through Cycle 24

Post by p_zetner »

Great project, awesome results.
Well done, Stu.

Cheers.
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Re: Plage Progression Through Cycle 24

Post by eroel »

Stu:
A fantastic and superb work done.
Best regards and thanks for sharing it.
Eric.


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Re: Plage Progression Through Cycle 24

Post by banjo »

Superb work and analyse Stu.
:bow :bow :bow :bow :bow :bow :bow :bow :bow :bow :bow
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Re: Plage Progression Through Cycle 24

Post by krakatoa1883 »

Fantastic work, Stu, much interesting indeed.


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