Some Solar System Activity

Which is more than I can generally say for us, considering the COVID-19 shelter-in-place order we are now under. I have tried to image more, but the clouds remain stubbornly close by, or in the way. What I have this time is 2 images of the sun and one of a close pairing of Venus and the Pleiades. Sun first.

Filament and barely visible plauge (very light area) above left of center

In this image, which is a black and white image falsely colored yellow, there is a filament, which is a prominence seen face on, near the top, about the 11 o'clock position. It is the dark-ish line that's not very big, or dark, for that matter. BUT, and that's a big but, it's there. That's pretty much the 1^st thing I've seen this year on the surface of the sun.

Prominence on right.

This image, shows a small prominence on the right side on the sun, as oriented. Believe it or not, the yellow is the same as in the previous image. However, I had to considerably lighten this image to be able to see the prominence, so the true yellow color shines through.

Venus "in" the Pleiades. Taurus and Aldebaran to upper left.

And finally, last night, April 3, 2020, there was a close pairing of Venus and the Pleiades. This is a single photo with a small amount of “correcting”, basically to make the sky a little darker. This was shot with a Canon Xsi DSLR, which is a fairly old camera at this point, especially for an “astronomy camera.” It's a 5 sec exposure using the 18mm-50mm “kit” lens. Viewed like this, it's not too bad. However, I have an extremely hard time focusing the lens; extremely small movements of the lens changes focus. Add to that the extremely small image of Venus (by far the biggest and brightest object seen) on the camera screen, even at 10x, and focus is not seen until the image is out of the camera and on the computer screen. Or, in this case, “out of focus”, is not found until the image is viewed on a computer screen where I have the ability to really zoom in on it. A good solution would be to have a different lens, but I can't justify that at this time. Maybe later; much later. By the way, if you zoom in really closely, you can see that the stars are out of focus and that Venus has a slight halo around it from the high clouds in front of it. Thicker clouds are just off to the right of Venus in this picture; I darkened the photo enough to hide them; well, almost, it is just barely visible. Also, in the upper left corner is the constellation of Taurus. The uppermost orange looking star is Aldebaran. The “V” shape is the asterism called “The Hyades”, which is an open cluster of stars. A longer, guided, exposure would show many more stars in this open cluster.