Easter Sun

A sleeping beauty, with a nice patch of prominences and a big new active region (bottom of the image) rotating into view. Full size images can be seen here.

Alien

I caught this monster stalking the edge of the sun last week. BIG and frighteningly beautiful, it haunted the limb for three days before disappearing. 

OMG!!

If ever there was a day to come home for lunch it was today. The sun was sizzling with delights… bright flaring in new active region 1272, filaments and large prominences galore. I shot 30 gigabytes of data. This quick image is made from 3 single video frames at different exposures, assembled in Photoshop to give an overview for the close-ups to follow. Stay tuned!

First and Last Jupiter

I had my first visit with the current apparition of Jupiter last week. It was a good date and perhaps the last outing for my trusty Imaging Source 21AF04 camera. This has been my go to planetary imager since 2004 - a great workhorse. Like its master, it’s gotten a little old and a little slow over time.

Yesterday I received my new Flea3 from Point Gray Research. Man, is this camera tiny!… and with a capture rate of 120 frames per second, blazingly fast. It saw first light this morning, pictures to follow soon.