Deirdre Kelleghan  skysketcher@gmail.com
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Easter Saturday North  Limb proms and filaments Solar Sketch - Comet PanStarrs from Bray - What's Up for April 2013 

4/3/2013

 
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 I was looking at the Sun Now page on the Solar Dynamics Observatory site. Sometimes that page shows wonderful energetic explosions on the solar limb but it may be too cloudy for observing.
Sometimes the solar action can be enticing enough to set up the PST (Personal Solar Telescope) and sketch when the weather permits.

March 30th Easter Saturday was one such day.  When I looked through my telescope there was a long twisting filament. Interesting north limb prominences challenged my eye as they altered their shapes over time.

When observing the sun you do not see the movement right in front of your eye. The sun is 149,600,000 km away from Earth and it takes eight minutes for its light to get to us. The observation of movement is perceived over 15 to 20 minutes and can lead to very useful sequences of drawings. In one way it’s like real time natural stop motion animation. Because my solar telescope is small the enormous solar disc (Diameter 1.39 million km) appears to be less than the 40mm diameter of the telescope. The filaments, active regions, sunspots and prominences are very tiny to the eye. A sunspot or prominence can be many times the size of the Earth but only millimetres to the eye. When I draw I look really really closely at the shapes, and textures of these features.

I pay great attention to the negative spaces, the black spaces between the multiple strands of plasma gas that are launched into space by the suns continuous activity.

Before I draw I observed the action for a while before deciding on an approach.  It is difficult to draw filaments as they appear to the eye on the solar disc. Filaments can be very dark against the bright sun or very grey almost like stringy cobwebs. Filaments are eruptions of electrified plasma gas; they seem dark as they are cooler than the sun that created them. When a filament continues its action over the edge of the solar disc it is called a prominence.  More structural detail within these features can be seen against the blackness of space. When a filament is seen to swing its action from the solar disc around the limb is it known as a filaprom.

For this drawing I used an etching method for the filaments, the combination of etching and drawing seems to give the desired effect for the moment. 

Sketch details: Bray Co Wicklow
Easter Saturday North Limb proms and filaments on the solar disc.

Duration of sketching time 13:00 UT - 13:55 UT Telescope: PST 40mm - 8 mm eyepiece using Pastels, on black paper.


On the same evening I was lucky to get a glimpse of Comet C 2011 L4 PanSTARRS from Bray
Click here for details


Warning: NEVER look directly at the sun through binoculars, a telescope or with your unaided eye
permanent blindness can result from the shortest look. Only ever look at the Sun in a situation supervised by someone who knows what they're doing.




What's Up for April 2013 from Jane Houston Jones

Coronal Loop and Twisting Prom Sketches - SDO captures Loop - What's Up for August 2012  from Jane Houston Jones  Mars Curiosity - Perseids

8/3/2012

 
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Coronal Loop
On holidays in Waterville Co Kerry I had some luck with solar observing during this rainy winter of a summer. July 19th my first view of the solar disc in days presented me with what looked like a loop within a loop C shaped layered prom on the eastern limb. Oh that had to be sketched it looked unusual.

PST 40 @50X 10:15 U T it seemed to come from a slight d
epression on the limb.


I never got the chance to observe the big Active Region 1520 but suspected this might be a goodbye wave :-) I like to be accurate in drawing solar features so I can compare my drawings to images taken at more or less the same time. This does two things  A) Its feedback on the my accuracy and B) I  learn from others who imaged the feature in order to  further understand  what is going on in my observation. On this occasion my sketch was of a
Coronal Loop. Magnetic looped prominences like this often occur after a large explosion on the sun, such was the case in my observation that morning. This powerful activity continued for something like twelve hours.
Image of the loop by Dave Tyler included in the slideshow below.

Once again on July 26th I had the happy chance of observing an enormous twisting prom on the NE limb. Never seen anything like it before, it was a veritable cornucopia of plasma gas swirling from the apparent edge of the sun.  The rest of the disc had very busy filaments jumping and twisting like ropes .

I am continually working on techniques to sketch filaments, active regions, flares, and proms. The challenge of capturing the sun on paper is in my opinion one of the most difficult gauntlets to satisfy in astronomical drawing.







Solar Sketch and Comet Garradd sketch Sept 1st - GRAIL to the Moon - What's Up for September 2011 GRAIL to the Moon

9/6/2011

 
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September 1st 2011 Solar Sketch East limb proms,Active Region 1283 , Fibrils show Magnetic field lines, Large filament. 10:50 UT
PST 40 / 8 mm TVP eyepiece - 50 X
Pastel , Conte, Pencil on black paper

There were  several  proms on the solar limb that morning but these busy proms  on the eastern limb seemed to be the most interesting to me.

Some of the magnetic field lines around AR 1283  stood out for several seconds in good detail so I sketched them in with pencil over the pastel. That's why they appear a little shiny as pencil does that  when used over pastel. Fibrils in the suns chromosphere  line up along magnetic field lines giving up  secret invisible information about their shape and extent of some of  the magnetic activity in the Active Regions.

Obviously I am re tuning and re focusing the telescope constantly  to capture all these features on the same plain , on a piece of paper. The sketch is CD size.



C/2009 P1 Garradd Sketch

Picture
C/2009 P1 Garradd September 1st 2011
Mag 8 Seeing 2 / 34 X / 35 mm eyepiece
200mm objective / FL 1,200mm
Bray , Co Wicklow Ireland.
South is up

The Comet was close to the hook in The Coathanger Astarism aka C399 Collinder 399 ,aka Al Sufi's Cluster or Brocchi's Cluster.
The X marks the position on September 2nd but cloud prevented a second sketch.



I was very impressed with the distance this icy visitor had covered in twenty four hours.
Garradd finder maps here below

garradd_findr.pdf
File Size: 109 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File


GRAILS A & B  Launch together September 8th
Where would we be without Apollo, those ground breaking adventurous manned missions to our Moon?  Included in my blog this month is a pdf showing the landing sites of Apollo missions, you can use the maps in it to see the places with your own eyes. (Courtesy of Jane Houston Jones)

The Grail mission twins will fill the cup of lunar knowledge to the brim with new data from these high tech robotic Moon scanners. It should be interesting at the end of the mission to see where the twins will be crash landed; this action will also generate information about the Moon.

Listen to this months What's Up video podcast below to get a good overview of the mission.

More on the GRAIL mission here
Two instantaneous launch opportunities are available daily for the GRAIL mission to blast off during a 42-day period extending from September 8 through October 19.

I will be watching the GRAIL launch on
Spaceflight Now  check in on the morning of the 8th to see how the weather window is doing and update yourself on launch times.


What's Up for September 2011 - Jane Houston Jones -  It's GRAIL to the Moon

You can see lunar landing sites on the Moon with your own eyes ! Download the pdf for a map to help you see them for yourself.

whats_up_on_the_moons_2_lunar_landing_sites.pdf
File Size: 1654 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

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    Author


    Deirdre Kelleghan is amateur astronomer,
    an artist and also  likes to write.

    "The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted"
    Plutarch

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