Friday's Sun, 2003/7/25

I joined my friend Tony Donnangelo for some Friday morning (~15:30 to
16:00 UT) H-alpha solar observing today. I arrived after most of the
activity that Tony saw some two hours earlier had subsided but there
was still a fairly large, horizontally-branching prominence on the
trailing limb that slowly morphed into what looked like a loop, as
well as a couple of small prominences. A Lumicon Solar Prominence
filter allowed us to make these observations.

There were only 3 sunspots to be seen when we switched to a Baader
AstroSolar white light filter. The one nearest the preceding limb
seemed to have a double umbra. The largest one, which was close to
the sun's center, had a complex umbra. The third spot was just making
headway on the disk from the trailing limb.

We used Tony's Takahashi FS-102 apochromatic refractor and a 3-6mm
Tele Vue Nagler zoom, a 5.2mm Pentax SMC XL, a 7mm Nagler type 6, and
a 9mm Nagler type 6 during the observing session.

Dave Mitsky