The Sun September 17, 2014

Conditions were very poor today. There was a lot of water vapor in the air and I had a hard time focusing the scope. The iOptron mount behaved perfectly, however, and I was able to get some good images, despite the conditions.

It is interesting how quiet the sun looks in white light, but in H-alpha, it looks very active.

This image shows filaments associated with AR 2164.

This second image shows activity around AR 2166. It has often been the case that a seemingly quiet sun can erupt with very high energy flares, If you compare today's images with the white light image on, for example, spaceweather.com, you can see why that is sometimes the case.