2005 12 10 First Solar H-alpha sketch
2005 12 10
Today’s date on Spaceweather.com.
This is my first H-alpha sketch and was created with watercolor pencils.
Yesterday afternoon the clouds parted long enough to get in a good session using the PST that John Crilly lent me. The amount of activity made for a wonderful view and I tried as hard as I could to render it accurately. I may have gotten a little dramatic on the prominences and filaments, but felt it was important to stress those areas so they wouldn’t get lost in the sketch.
There were 3 filaments…actually there were about 10 until I looked up wondering what the heck was going on. It was then that I noticed a tree was in front of the sun! So I moved the scope to a tree free area and was happy to see one dark definite filament, a soft lighter almost w shaped filament, and finally a third small softer one at the south eastern edge. I softened these up with a red colored pencil, which was my error as it really made these areas too pronounced.
Finally I added the prominences, two beautiful ones on the Eastern and Western limbs, using two shades of colored pencils. And then added the small spikes of prominences where needed. Also, you can see evidence of faculae towards 833 on the Western limb by a lightened area in the darkened photosphere.
The really cool thing about this observation was the looped effect of the Western prominence….it’s really cool reading how the magnetic fields support the shapes of cloud like conditions of these prominences! I thought I was seeing things until I saw Mila’s photo of this same prominence: Prominence 12/10/05
PCW Memorial Observatory - Erika Rix 
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2005 – Start of Solar Obsession « PCW Memorial Observatory – Erika Rix said this on December 8, 2010 at 23:33 |