10/10/2010. I'm spending way too much of the month of October in Tennessee getting a house ready for renters. I brought the solar telescope along for recreation, but did not bring a tracking mount for it. The Giro alt-azimuth works fine for sungazing and, with some planning, can be used for photos, too.

On the 10th (almost two weeks ago as I finally post this), a huge filament rotated into view along with active region 1112 and began a stately traverse of the solar disk. It was quite the sensation among sunwatchers. As others noted, it reached several tens of thousands of miles longer than the distance from the Earth to the Moon. I got to show it to Al, Bill, Ethan, and to Tom Dosser one afternoon in mid-month.

Here's a capture with the Chameleon on an Aspire One netbook computer. I let the sun drift across the field of view, then used Registax to combine the images and cropped down to the area in common to all 500 frames. Single barlow, double-stacked filtration.

This image needs to be more carefully assembled, as I think there are some artifacts intruding between the lower portion of the filament and the acrive region above it.