Solar viewing at Houge Park 11/5

by Michael Swartz

I was at Houge Park yesterday (Friday) from 1:00pm to 4:30pm. I had planned on being there until 5:00pm but since the sun settled down behind the trees at 4:30pm I thought it best to pack up and move out since there was no one else with me there anyway.

There were two really large prominences nearly exactly opposite from each other. Both were quite high off the limb and had a great deal of structure and lots of arcs, loops and bridges. They were very pretty to look at. The two main sunspots were facing directly at us yesterday afternoon and had a lot of swirling surface activity around them. While I was watching them the space between the two main sunspots lit up with lots of bright yellow/white spots. Some of the really bright areas where round, some were square or rectangular shaped. They grew larger and brighter and then faded out completely in about 30 to 40 minutes. We may have a blast coming our way.

I didn't have many visitors yesterday. No one I knew came by. But there were some nice families walking through the park and some of them came by with their children to ask about the telescope and look at the sun.

I modified my scope configuration again yesterday. I purchased a special adapter ring from the Takahashi distributor Texas Nautical and was able to shorten the Extender-Q configuration. I found that I was thus able to use the Extender-Q and my Binoviewers without the corrector. So that lowered the resulting magnification down to where I could again comfortable use my Coronado CEMAX 18mm eyepieces.

Well, that's it for now.

As a reminder, I will be at Central Park in Fremont again tomorrow (Sunday 11/7) from 1:00pm to 5:00pm if the sun stays visible that late. (late? That sounds funny).

Posted on sf-bay-tac Nov 06, 2004 12:34:33 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 21, 2005 00:05:27 PT