Sunday, February 23, 2014

Finally some clear skies

Finally we got some clear skies over Östersund. It's been almost a month since last time I was able to see a starry night. To my luck the aurora activity picked up a bit during the night. Here's a image from Frösön showing the aurora oval over a distant village.


Monday, February 3, 2014

Big sunspot AR1967

Today the Sun finally showed up after what feels like an eternity.

At the moment there is a very big sunspot on the Sun and it has recently been producing a lot of flares and is very active. The sunspot is named AR1967.

This is my first shot of the Sun since autumn 2013. The Sun doesn't get high enough this time of the year to get good and sharp images. At the time, the Sun was only 7° above the horizon, so usually I don't do solar photography this early in the year. But today I just had to get a shot of big sunspot AR1967 to see it's complexity. And what a view it was through my telescope, very impressive. Also there were some great prominences out on the limb.

I've included a scale sized Earth to better show the size of this big sunspot.