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Our Sun on July 2, 2015, 17:54 UTC

 

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Sun: Our sun has a mean distance from earth of about 93,000,000 miles, and a diameter of about 864,000 miles (a little more than a hundred times that of Earth). The sun is a very active body, changing noticeably by the hour.

I went out to have a look at the sun at about 10am local time (1700 UTC), and was delighted to see a very large prominence. I watched it for a bit, then left, intending to come back later. An hour later, I was shocked to see that the prominence had broken away from the solar disc, and was rapidly dissipating. I quickly attached my solar camera, and got this.

It turns out such a phenomenon is knows as a "Disparition Brusque" (sudden vanishing). Disparition Brusque eruptions usually last less than one or two hours, and vary in form from a simple fading away of the quiescent, to a spectacular "lifting off", where the prominence rises up and drifts away from the sun, slowly breaking up in the process. This was the latter. Mild surface brightening can also occasionally occur. Sometimes, a vanished quiescent will even reform a few hours or days later near its previous location. In a few large eruptions, a Dispartition Brusque can produce a Coronal Mass Ejection.



Technical Information:

This is processed from a stack of 1023 images, taken at 25 fps.

Equipment: Coronado SolarMax II 90 Double Stacked hydrogen alpha solar scope, with a BF30 blocking filter; images acquired with a Point Grey Research Grasshopper3 6mp CCD monochrome video camera (GS3-U3-60QS6M-C).

Image Acquisition/Camera Control: FireCapture

Processing: No calibration performed. Images stacked in AutoStakkert! 2, sharpened in Pixinsight, and further massaged in Photoshop CS5

Location: Redmond, Washington, USA

Date: Data acquired 17:54UTC, 2 July, 2015; image posted July 3, 2015

Copyright Mark de Regt, 2015