Two Solar Images … Plus Blogger Foolishness

First image. Taken on April 16, 2020. Actually, this isn't a single image, as you can plainly see, but a sequence on images taken over about 1 hour. In the past, when I've talked to people about “prominences” on the sun, I've explained that a major difference between a prominence and a flare is how long they were visible. In other words, you can't tell the difference just by looking, visually, at the “flame” on the side of the sun for just a minute or so. As it turns out, most of what I see is a prominence. This time, I just plain got lucky and got a flare. Set up time was short, because I wanted to start the imaging as soon as possible, then set the imaging to run until the flare essentially stopped. The best way to watch this is to put it on “repeat” and watch the “flame” portion to see the plasma leave the sun, then look closer to the sun to see how the surface settles back down. The "repeat" is just pressing the circular arrow in the lower left corner. I also suggest making it full screen (lower right corner).The settling down reminds me of an ocean wave.

Then, on April 28, 2020 I read on Spaceweather.com that there were a couple of actual sunspots! One was from the past cycle (24) and one from the upcoming cycle (25). So, I thought to myself, “self, why no see if you and get a picture of them.” And that's what I did. They are small, and what shows up the best is the hotter area, which shows up white. The darker, “cool” area, which is black, is very small and hard to see. The images were taken in black and white, like the ones above, and the yellow color added in post processing. If nothing else, the color helps to increase the contrast between the sunspots and the surface of the sun.

Sunspots!

Finally, what's going on with Blogger? About half of the images uploaded for blog entries this month had just disappeared! I reloaded them at the same time as this entry, so, perhaps, they will remain. If not, well, that may well signal the end of the blog. Maybe that's not a bad thing.