2007 06 09, 1500-1945 UT

PCW Memorial Observatory, Zanesville, Ohio

AR0959 and AR0960 Copyright Erika Rix

This was to be my first solar session in the new observatory. It will be strange not having the LXD75 in my living room anymore, but the most loved Maxscope will still remain in the house with me when I’m not observing. Riser and Buttercup (the two younger dogs) kept me company during the session today. Buttercup was the guarding the door (I’m sure anyone could have bribed her a dog cookie and she would have happily let them in) and Riser found a shady spot behind my truss dob.

I started off with putting the Thousand Oaks white light filter on the LX200. Now that the big fella has his own pier so that I don’t have to tear down and set him up, I finally had a chance for first light on this filter since we bought the scope used a few years back. Wouldn’t you know it wouldn’t seat properly on the OTO because of the brackets for mounting the ED80 on the scope?! I’ll have to see about fixing that situation soon. In the mean time, I can always resort back to the ETX70.

On to the fun part, now…the Maxscope views.

The flare activity this morning had pretty much subsided by the time my session took place. Yes, I was disappointed, but AR0960 was still showy with AR0959 accessorizing it nicely. There was a thin little plage marking 959 as well as plage just East of the center of the disk, and plage also very thinly following the path of a long slender filament just inside the Eastern limb. Add the remarkable plage details in AR0960 to that, and you have a straight line of interrupted plage going from East to West.

The M Shape Prominence Copyright Erika Rix

When tuning, I could easily pick out several other filaments across the disk even though they were very slender and short, almost like little crooked crosshairs of an eyepiece. There were five definite prominences with a few little hints of others on the limb. The huge prominence that was evident on the NW limb earlier this morning was no longer there that I could see. However, the “pick of my pleasure” prominence was the presence of an “m” shaped faint one on the NE limb. And this, my friends, became the start of a three and a half hour project for me today. It made no matter that I had lots of chores to do. Astronomy comes first…at least today.

The series for this one prom was rendered in two sessions. An hour with 1 minute intervals, an hour and a half break so that I could at least get the riding mower part of the grass cutting done, and then another hour session with 10 minute intervals again. I would have loved to spend the entire day doing this, but I was starting to get sunburn on my farmer’s tan legs and feet that today sported sandals instead of sneakers. Nevertheless, perhaps 12 sketches of the same prominence were enough to show how dynamic the Sun is over such a short period of time. Or could I have really stopped because I didn’t want to be known as the eccentric prom lady that latched on to only one prom, sketching it over and over again with a strange fixation…you can chose, if you like.

Sketches were done with black Strathmore paper and colored Conte' crayons for the full disk, white Conte’ for the prominence sequence.

Erika Rix