My first solar session of the year!  Here’s a close up of the sun from the 16th. Rather poor attempt at making a mosaic but some interesting prominences and sunspots around the edge.  I am writing this on 2 June as a cold front sweeps across the UK so I don’t think we’ll be seeing any today, alas!

After setting up, I wondered why I could hardly see a thing on the laptop screen at my normal settings and needed exposures of 800 milliseconds with huge gain to capture anything meaningful.  I then realised I still had the 742nm pass filter from my lunar session, d’oh!

The seeing was pretty poor and not helped by passing cumulus clouds causing a break in play.

Sun in Hydrogen Alpha with close up of Prominences and Sunspots
Sun in H-Alpha 16 May 2016

 

Large Prominence at 12 o'clock
Large Prominence