A Sunny Disposition

Images taken on April 2, 2017 near the Starlight Observatory.

This is the beginning of a venture into something I haven't done in years, and certainly not on my own. I now own a H-alpha, or hydrogen alpha, telescope that is used to look at the sun, and only the sun. Among other things, this will let me observe the sun in a way I haven't done from the observatory. The scope allows only light in the H-alpha band to come through to the eyepiece. The H-alpha band is around 656.6nm. Light at that wavelength is very red, hence the red images. Well, mostly red. Actually, the exposure allows the color to change to white because the image is overexposed, either slightly or a lot depending on which image we are looking at. However, if you looked through the eyepiece, the sun looks very red.

As a side note, the “red layer” of the sun is known as the chromosphere. The chromosphere is “outside” , or nearer to us, than the part of the sun we “normally” see. What we usually see is the yellowish photosphere. The chromosphere is, as I understand it, basically hydrogen that has been heated by the underlying layers of the sun enough to cause the electron to move to a different energy shell. When the electron drops back down to it's lower energy state, it emits a photon of light at the 656nm wavelength. While sunspots are visible in both the chromosphere and the photosphere, prominences are visible only in the chromosphere.

Surface of the sun showing features

As you can see in this image, we have three feature: sunspots, some of which I have pointed out, plage, which is an intense brightening on the surface caused by a mechanism similar to the mechanism that causes sunspots, and, right on the very edge of the sun, 3 prominences. The prominences are quite dim in this image, hence not really very “prominent” because of the exposure needed to see the other features.

Above is the same image, but with out the markings. Perhaps you can see a little more detail.

Same image as above, showing prominences. Longer exposure makes surface look white.

 

Last, but not least, is the overexposed, for the surface detail that is, image which shows more clearly the prominences. It's difficult to tell, but it appears that the uppermost prominences may be part of an arch. In the full resolution image, there appears to be a faint wisp of red directed towards the middle prominence.