Nice piece, Rob. Comets are amazing creatures through telescopes. They can either benefit from a large aperture, or other times a smaller aperture at low power can be best to observe them with. And then these little buggers can change their stripes in a matter of days just to keep things interesting.
~x.X.x~
I’ve been able to steal a few moments over the last couple of weeks to sketch Sol.
This is turning into a wonderful journey for me with the Sun. I am not just marvelling at its ever changing surface. It has also spurred me onto learning so much about our parent star. I never thought nuclear fusion could be such a spectacular topic!!!
August 18 gave me a very active limb and chromosphere quarter section. The chromosphere (surface of the Sun) was riddled with fine filaments (prominences seen over the surface), plages and sunspots. The limb had an assortment of prominence types – arch, platform arches, & a pyramid. Also a lovely long spicule.
Yesterday was a race to beat the approaching clouds and rain. The race became more intense as the Sun had two wonderful areas of activity on the go, but on opposite sides of the disk. As things turned out, I was only able to complete only one of the two sketches I hoped to accomplish. Better something than nothing…
The second sketch presented here shows two different stages of prominence development. The brighter part on the lower right shows mature platform prominences. They are called platform as they exhibit a flat, table like roof where high energy plasma is racing through the magnetic fields on the surface of the Sun. There are two platform prominences here, with a smaller & brighter one underneath the taller but thinner one above it. The larger top prominence stretched out into an ever diminishing ribbon, to then frazzle out into shredded pieces. A really lovely spectacle to follow through off fine details.
It is the disintegrating stages of a coronal mass ejections that we see on the upper left. We see just the remaining columns of plasma that is being held in place by the weakening magnetic fields. When I started this sketch I had been able to spot some of the plume of escaping plasma being launched off into space. I should have sketched this section first, rather than the platform prominences, for when I returned to the CME, that plume was too faint to see through the incoming thin cloud. Oh, well, lesson learnt…
Both sketches were done using the same equipment:
Scope: ED80 f7.5 refractor
Gear: Daystar Quark, 25mm plossl, 101X
Dates: 18th August & 3rd September, 2015
Location: Sydney, Australia.