Sunspot Group 652

    On 24 July 2004 Pacific Daylight Time I captured a rapidly developing flare and an associated filament that whipped across the face of the Sun in about 20 minutes. The imaging was performed at a local park at prime focus of my Takahashi FS-102 using a Coronado 60mm H-alpha filter and a Philips ToUcam Pro with an IR blocking filter. The movie below was generated from the last 17 three minute videos I obtained on this date, with the session ending at about 6pm local time. The filament was not visible in the ToUcam video capture interface, otherwise I would have continued imaging given the amazing transient phenomena. I ended the session because the Sun was well past the meridian, and I'd been imaging since about 10am.
    The green channel tends to show more surface and filamentary detail (see my discussion from my 18 July 2004 solar imaging session). Contrary to my experience on 18 July 2004, an exposure of 1/50 second was needed to obtain good surface contrast. The ToUcam image characteristics are not that stable, as simply changing my laptop battery in the field results in color shifts etc. in the raw images even though the interface settings remain unchanged. It must be kept in mind that the ToUcam was not developed for scientific applications.
    Still images that show the rapidly changing conditions are located below the movies.

Flare and Transient Filaments (37kb, 38kb) 25July 2004, 00:27UT
Flare and Transient Filaments (36kb, 35kb) 25 July 2004, 00:30UT
Flare and Transient Filaments (35kb, 34kb) 25 July 2004, 00:33UT
Flare and Transient Filaments (36kb, 35kb) 25 July 2004, 00:36UT
Flare and Transient Filaments (35kb, 33kb) 25 July 2004, 00:39UT
Flare and Transient Filaments (39kb, 37kb) 25 July 2004, 00:42UT
Flare and Transient Filaments (39kb, 38kb) 25 July 2004, 00:45UT
Flare and Transient Filaments (38kb, 37kb) 25 July 2004, 00:48UT
Flare and Transient Filaments (40kb, 39kb) 25 July 2004, 00:51UT