Solar viewing 9/27 - Dancing Flames

by Michael Swartz

Well, in spite of my advertising efforts, the turn out was pretty small. Bob and I set up our scopes at Rengstorff park on Monday. It was a beautiful sunny day in a nice park. Alex came by and viewed with us and visited for a while. We had a few of the people strolling through the park stop by and look and chat for a while. It was nice.

By far the most spectacular thing I saw all day was a wonderful configuration of prominences that looked like 5 tall, twisted flames that appeared to be locked in some kind of choreographed dance. It was really beautiful. A few hours after first admiring them the middle ones seemed to be bowing and the structures looked more like the outer petals of a large flower. Just amazing.

I set up my scope today while enjoying a chili dog at Der Weinerschnitzel (not sure on the spelling or the contents of said dog). The remnants of the dancing flames could still be seen. It was not as striking as yesterday but still interesting. Today's star feature was a large swirling and arching prominence on the eastern (?) limb (around 3:00pm in my field of view). It was clearly coming (or going to) from behind around the limb and arching up. It appeared to be quite fat in the central bulge of the arch. It tapered and twisted as it reconnected with the chromosphere surface. It arched pretty high. Quite impressive.

Well that's it for now. I plan on scheduling a sunday afternoon solar viewing session somewhere some weekend soon. I'm going to advertise it in the merc, the chron, on craigslist, yahoo astro groups, and of course on TAC.

Posted on sf-bay-tac Sep 28, 2004 15:10:50 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 11, 2005 23:34:44 PT