Date: November 16, 2011

Title: October 25th 2011 Solar Show

Organization: RapidEye Observatory – a private observatory in rural Lee County, NC

Link: http://www.rapideye.us/astro/RapidEye-ClearSky.html

Description: On Oct. 25, 2011, activity from the Sun put on a show for skywatchers.

Bio: I’ve been captivated by astronomy ever since I was a kid, living in NW Colorado where the Milky Way was bright enough to read by.

I can be found most clear nights in my pasture with either my 4.5″ SkyQuest, 10″ Deep Sky Hunter, 18″ Obsession, or one of my MANY pairs of Binoculars.

Sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” has been sponsored by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, a recognized leader in astronomy education. Get Go StarGaze, the iPhone app developed by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for the NASA Night Sky Network. Find an astronomy event or a club in your area with Go StarGaze or at the Night Sky Network website.

Transcript:

Podcast for 365 Days of Astronomy – November 16, 2011

October 25th 2011 Solar Show

As I have stated in a previous 365DA podcast, one of the great things about attending star parties is that you can look through many different types of telescopes. One of my favorites is looking through various solar telescopes that will be scattered around the observing area during the day. I personally own a white light solar filter for my 4.5” f/9 dob and can easily observe sun spots and associated features, but in order to see the next level of detail on the sun you really need a narrow-band filter such as a Hydrogen-alpha, Calcium, or even a Sodium band filter. These allow you to see prominences, filaments, plages, and other surface features that add a whole new level of beauty to the sun.

Over the last 5 or 6 years I’ve had the opportunity to look at the sun through many different narrow band telescopes from the economical 40mm PST all the way up to a Double Stack SolarMax 90 Hydrogen Alpha telescope. But the recent solar minimum has conspired to limit the features I’ve seen to an occasional sun spot and prominence, but nothing very dramatic or particularly interesting.

That all changed for me at the East Coast Star Party near Coinjock, NC on the weekend of October 22nd, 2011. We had an almost perfect stretch of weather from Friday until late Saturday where transparency was crystal clear, seeing was rock solid, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Looking through several white light filters mounted to 8” to 12” SCT’s we observed several very large and interesting sunspot groups. We could also see some very active areas near a large sunspot group near the limb.

When I moved over to a nearby PST I was amazed at the amount of activity on the sun that was visible. There were several nice prominences, some dark loops across the face, and many bright active regions on the surface. When I moved up to the 90mm Doublestacked telescope, the detail went even deeper. I had only seen this level of solar activity on SOHO pictures posted on the internet. I spent several hours revisiting the views in the different telescopes watching the filaments extend and retract and the active regions swirl with activity.

The following Monday, October 24th, 2011 was the opening day of the Mid Atlantic Star Party near Robbins, NC. Our great weather continued to persist and after I finished setting up my camp site and telescope, I started wandering around the observing area looking for some solar scopes and I wasn’t disappointed. There was an 11” SCT with a white light filter and I observed that the sunspot group that had been near the limb on Saturday had further rotated around towards us and there was still quite a bit of activity in some smaller spots pointed almost directly at us. When I looked through the piggyback mounted Solarmax 60mm H-alpha scope, I was floored by the amount of activity. There were several very large prominences on the limbs, at least 3 large dark loops across the face, and an amazing amount of activity near the center of the disk, surrounding the small sunspot group I had seen in the white light filter.

I spent about an hour revisiting the views in both telescopes, considering myself fortunate to have been able to observe all that detail and activity on the sun not just once, but twice in a week.

Little did I know the sun wasn’t done! Sometime during the day, one of those active regions I saw pointed at us threw a large Coronal Mass Ejection right towards the Earth! At the star party we were all too busy getting settled in for the week to check the space weather and no idea of the CME.

Around 21:30 EDT I was really settling into observing with my 18” f/4.5 Obsession. Transparency was good but the seeing was still a little bit soft, so I was mainly focusing on extended deep sky objects. The location where MASP is located is dark, but there are some small light sources nearby and the skies are not pristine. While trying to locate an object to the north in Draco, I noticed that the skies had gotten quite bright in that direction. I heard several other nearby observers also lamenting that they just got clouded out on whatever they were looking at.

I stepped away from my finder scope, looking towards the north thinking that someone had just turned on a large flood light nearby – because that light dome I was seeing, wasn’t there 5 minutes ago. It took me a few seconds of looking at the light to realize that it wasn’t motionless like a flood light and that it had a strong red tinge to it…

Aurora’s may be common in places like Canada, Alaska, and Scandinavia, but here in North Carolina, they are very rare and it took us a few minutes to realize what we were looking at – Northern Lights! If there was any doubt of what we were seeing, the red intensified, spread even further towards the zenith, and several green pillars of light shot up through the display. Word started spreading around the star party and within seconds, almost everyone at the star party was standing next to their telescopes staring off towards the north, slack jawed and dumbfounded – it was eerily quiet. After several moments of taking it all in, there were occasional ohhhs and ahhhs heard while we saw it move and undulate.

The primary aurora we saw spread between Polaris and Cassiopeia and at its peak, extending above Cassiopeia towards the zenith. There was a smaller section streaking up just west of Polaris. The show lasted for a good 20 minutes and we continued to have lower level and less bright observations for another 20 minutes after that.

I cant think of a better way to start off a star party, and indeed, it turned out be be an excellent week of dark, clear, and steady skies.

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
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