I had to dig deep into the data for this image of Sunspot AR1731, the jet stream winds over Brisbane seemed to be lashing the Earth’s atmosphere, providing only tantalisingly brief periods of steady seeing. In the end, I managed to harvest some 100 frames from a 3000 frame movie file to reveal the grainy appearance of the solar photosphere.
Granules on the photosphere of the Sun are caused by convection currents of plasma and a typical granule has a diameter on the order of 700 to 1,000 kilometres and lasts 8 to 20 minutes before dissipating.
Taken with a Tak Mewlon 180 F12, Tak x1.6 Extender and ZWO ASI120MM CCD camera.
