AR3664 continues to impress, its grown over night with a lot more interesting pneumbra around the umbras in the complex arrangement making for a very beautiful sunspot region to view in continuum. It's also interesting with crazy brim stone and fire in h-alpha and its currently blowing up lower class flares quite a bit. The x-class flare threat is pretty high on this one, so it may blow its top at any time. It's probably close. It hasn't simmered down in days and its growing, so we're going to likely see some x-class flares from this beast. Maybe a few. Between AR3663 and AR3664, these two spots so far will likely easily have the most x-flares for the entire cycle 25 so far in such a short period. I threw in a quick Calcium disc to test an optic at this wavelength and was pleasantly surprised (AT102ED).
B&W:
False Color:
Equipment:
H-alpha:
Aries Tri-band D-ERF (1) -> 150mm F8 Double -> Baader Red 2" Filter (D-ERF 2) -> Air Spaced Etalon 1 -> Baader TZ4 4x Telecentric -> Air Spaced Etalon 2 - > ITF + 18mm BF -> IMX432 Sensor
Continuum:
150mm F8 Doublet -> Baader 2" Wedge -> ND3.0 -> Continuum5 40nm Filter -> 1.6x Barlow -> IMX290 Sensor
CaK Disc:
AT102ED (102mm F7) masked to 60mm (F12) with Lunt Cak B1200 Module -> IMX253 Sensor
(This was an experiment, at full 102mm aperture it showed some contrast loss so the lens is not great at 393nm full aperture, but when reduced to 60mm the contrast shot up very significantly and so the middle of the glass is well figured to 393nm and the filter performs better at F10 or longer anyways, much better)
Seeing was good; here's some live views from FireCapture, this is what I saw at the eyepiece, no processing here, this is the view at these scales in sub-arc-second seeing peaks.
- FC_Continuum_05082024.jpg (161.93 KiB) Viewed 781 times
- FC_HA_DS_05082024.jpg (103.79 KiB) Viewed 781 times
- Solarsetup_05082024.jpg (207.48 KiB) Viewed 781 times
My snail buddy out in the garden doing solar with me!
- Snail_05082024.jpg (64.29 KiB) Viewed 781 times
Very best,
