by Michael Swartz
It was interesting today. I tried to get the festival management to assist me in finding a nice location near the perimeter of the festival but they insisted that there was nothing they could do because the only areas they controlled where those that others had paid to reserve and they didn't want to risk offending them. So I drove around a bit and found a $5.00 parking area staffed by teachers and students from a local high school. I offered to rent to spots, one for my car and one for my scope but they insisted that I only pay for one space and then positioned me conveniently next to the rear of the parking area which happened to have quite a bit of traffic of people going from one area of the fair to another. I quickly set up and then was soon joined by SanJay who drove all the way from the Sacramento area to view with me. He set up his Orion 4" Mac and put a Thousand oaks filter on it. And then we were able to offer people passing by a view of the photosphere and of the chromosphere. We were there together from about 12:30pm/1:00pm to about 4:30pm. We had maybe 70 people or so stop by during that time. It was really a lot of fun.
The sky was clear with puffs of clouds here and there but only a few actually crossed the face of the sun so for the most part we had unobstructed viewing. The winds were higher than I liked and on several occassions I had to steady my patio umbrella to keep it from blowing over. But during those moments of calm the seeing was pretty good. A few times the detail was razor sharp.
The sun had only two spot groups. I was interested in seeing was spot 656 looked like since I expected it to be a big one. It really wasn't too large but it had a nice active region around it. During the time of our observation we noticed the faculae near the spot brighten, widen and then nearly dissappear. On the eastern limb there were a number of interesting prominences. There was one very large lofty prominence that hung up above the limb of the sun like a faint cloud. It was quite some distance up and seemed to dissapating slightly over the three and a half hours we were watching it. During moments of steady seeing it seemed as if the surface of the sun were not smooth but had large rolling hills and as if the spots were in large swirling turbulent valleys. There were also an interesting array of filiments here and there. One time I noticed that a number of filiments seemed to form three distinct lines all at different angles but seeming to eminate from one point. Today wasn't a bad day on the sun at all.
Thank you Sanjay for coming to join me. We had a very nice day talk and viewing together and sharing the sun with the people at the fair.
That's all for today.
Posted on sf-bay-tac Aug 02, 2004 00:11:43 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 05, 2005 22:14:36 PT