9/28/2010: I can't believe it's been three weeks since I worked up solar images. [With good reason: you worked on one just last week, but it got shuffled off into another part of the slow blog because you thought of it as testing the Amazing Telescopic Suitcase.]

After a weekend at the other lake and an interlude of clouds and heavy rain, the air today is astonishingly clear. A look through far UV instruments aboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory convinced me there was something worth seeing on the Sun. It took ten minutes to get the mount rolled into a new spot (the Sun, after the equinox, is moving south quickly, and I have to exploit different gaps in the trees), power arranged, telescope mounted, computer booted, camera connected, focused and taking data. Thus:

LS60HaTDS50, Point Grey Chameleon, screw-in barlow, 500 frames. 6ms, 8db gain.
Registax (w/wavelets), Focus Magic, Photoshop to even out gradients (and apply color, of course).

I've left this one a little dark to emphasize how brilliant some of the active bits really are.

The big spot and associated spicules and filaments is active region 11109; at right is smaller, fiestier 11110. Both are just past the solar meridian. Apparently, "9"'s magnetic field lines are so stable that they've done very little breaking and reconnecting (therefore it hasn't been emitting many flares). Spaceweather.com indicates that "10" fired off a class C1 flare just about sunrise today. It still looks a little excited in this picture some hours later.

A little bit of maintenance today: the OEM foam in the Lunt case has been shrinking pretty steadily, perhaps owing to the heat. Today I scrapped it in favor of Pelican diced foam. I managed to peel one of the edge strips from the outside of the case, as well -- bumped it with the telescope trailer. A project for someday soon: bolt aluminum angles to prettify and reinforce the bottom side edges.