Day 9: HTML and CSS

Today we spent our time perfecting our webpage. It's really coming along nicely now. It's been a shame about the weather this week, we haven't been able to get out and track the sunspot, but noone wants to be out in torrential rain!

Bad weather and nice photos

For the past few days, the weather has been getting worse and worse. It's always overcast and so we can't go out and take any nice images. Now our sunspot we have been watching is decaying, so there won't be much to look at soon.
Instead, I thought I would share with you my favourite photo of the day: It is taken by a guy called Miguel Claro off the coast of Lisbon, Portugal, with several planets all in a row.

Day 8: More transits

Today we mainly worked on the webpage, the blog and some more solar transits, because surprise surprise, it's cloudy outside. And wet. Not ideal observing weather really. We learnt more about webpages, HTML and CSS, as well as using a modified verion of our ISS tracking software to predict more than 11 days in advance. Hopefully I'll get some maps of those up soon.

Day 7: ISS transits across the Sun

Today it was cloudy once again, and it looks like it will be that way for the foreseable future :( So today Charlie worked on the website and I looked into some photos people have taken of the ISS transiting in front of the Sun.

They are quite impressive really.
Here's one this guy took and on further investigation he used a program specifically written to predict where this would happen based on his latitude and longitude.



So we went and downloaded a program called ISS TRANSIT PREDICITON, which can be found here: http://pictures.ed-morana.com/ISSTransits/ Putting in our longitude and latitude of Bristol, and our elevation of 80 feet, we were able to produce these results, which then transfered onto GoogleMaps:
As you can see, they are some pretty impressive results. Going out to see one to get a photo would require some driving. It's a shame about the weather because it would have been worth the drive.

Space Weather (Flares and Geomagnetic Storms)

There are many forms of solar weather, sunspot, CMEs, solar flare, geomagnetic storms etc...Today the magnetic storm over the large sunspot has been getting more intense and there are some great UV images taken of it here:

However, we didn't really know what a solar flare or a geomagnetic storm was, so here's a little blurb about them:

Solar flares are explosions on the Sun that happen when energy stored in a twisted magnetic field is suddently released. Flares produce a burst of radiation across the EM spectrum, and scientists divide them into 3 classes, according to their X-ray brightness. THe three categories are:
X CLASS - massive events which can trigger planet wide radio blackout and long lasting ratio storms
M CLASS - medium sized flares that can affect the Earth's polar regions, with minor radiation storms
C CLASS - in comarison, quite small flares with few noticeable consequences on Earth.

Geomagnetic storms are temporary disturbances of the Earth's magnetosphere caused by space weather. It is caused by a solar wind shock wave which strikes the Earth's magnetic field. The pressure from the solar wind modifies the electric currents in the ionosphere.

So there's a little blurb on both; two of many forms of solar weather. It's interesting to see how it is predicted, and why it is important, especially for solar flares to be predicted in order to protect radio communication on Earth.

Active Regions today

We have been monitoring an active region for a few days now, hoping that the sunspots get more prominent and we can see more features. The active region is a local area around the sunspot where you might see flares and plagues, which is a patchy brightening around the region. Here is today's photo from SpaceWeather.com so you know what we are looking for.



You can see the two dark sunspots, but there are lots of little ones that aren't as prominent. Today, there is a 15% chance of a class M X-ray flare, which is exciting. The flare is explosion of energy, and is really quite exciting!

Day 6: Promising space weather, but cloudy

Today was a good day with promising features, but unfortunately in Bristol it was completely overast and cloudy all day. The active region we have been watching over the weekend has developed more, with a sunspot number of 25 and a 15% chance of solar flares. Which should be exciting, but we are stuck indoors. Instead, we worked on the history of solar imagery, which is really quite interesting, did some work on our website, and did a bit of image processing. We chatted with one of our supervisors about the photos we took on Friday, and he thinks they can be editted to look better. After doing more research, we learnt how to do some image processing.and used a ISS transit program, which tells us when the ISS will next transit the Sun. That's quite a cool thing, as some people have some awsome photos they have taken before us, but so far, all it's done is crash the computer! Hoping for more luck and sunny skies tommorow!

A little bit about sunspots

Theres lots of features of the Sun, and of stars, but sunspots are really quite exciting. Here's a little blurb I wrote about sunspots:

Sunspots are temporary dark, cooler blotches consisting of dark (called the umbra) surrounded by a lighter penumbra, both of which are silhouetted against the brighter photosphere. Sunspots are typically the size of the Earth. They are caused by intense magnetic activity which inhibits convection, therefore forming areas of reduced surface temperature. Sunspots are the visual counterparts of magnetic flux tubes in the Sun's convection zone that get wound up by the differential rotation of the Sun. If the stress on the tube reaches a certain limit they puncture the Earth's surface and convection is inhibited at the puncture points, and the energy flux from the Sun's interior decreases, and with it, the surface temperature.

At the moment we are on a realllllly long sunspot minimum. These solar cycles, which determine how often and how many sunspots we see, are regular at abou 11 year intervals. But at the moment, we are waiting to come out of a long minimum. Hopefully we will see some more sunspots during the duration of the project! Here's a link to a good article:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/11jul_solarcycleupdate/

Day 5: Observing with the graduates!

Today, a lot of people graduate. Or at least a lot of Physicists do. So there's parents and students everywhere today. We went out in the morning because it was finally sunny. We took tons of videos and stills today, but sadly there were no exciting features. It just appears that the sun is entirely blank! After reading online that there should be SOME solar activity, we decided perhaps we were overexposing the camera, so after lunch we went back out to mess around with the settings. After changing the brightness, shutter speed and frames per second, we were convinced we had had a proper go at trying to fix the problem, but to no avail. We will have to see if our supervisors have any ideas. I guess it could be down to the solar minimum and there not being any very prominent sunspots, or maybe we are just doing it wrong.

Diagram of the Telescope (Coronado PST)

Here is our telescope all labellled. It's quite nice to take it out into the gardens, people are really interested in what we are doing while they are sitting having their lunch!

Day 4: HTML

Today it was very overcast and quite rubbish for observing really, so we stayed inside, and as we only had one image, we decided to start making a website using html. Neither of us has any previous knowlegde of it, but we got along all right, making some webpages describing the telescope, and we will keep working on it when it's overcast. It was nice to do some research on sunspots and the history of solar imaging. It's quite amazing some of the work people did with much more basic instruments! I'll have to put a link up to the website when it's done.

Day 3: Observing

After lunch we ventured outside even thought it was a little cloudy. We saw some great images through the eyepiece, even where the clouds were passing in front of the Sun, but the camera wasnt getting the same image. We also struggled with getting the laptop in the shade to see the screen. In the end, we upped the brightness on the camera settings and Charlie took a lovely photo with the camera which showed a sunspot.

Day 2: Our telescope (and camera)

We are using a Coronado PST (Personal Solar Telescope) which is designed for amature astronomers. Its quite small little thing, very light and easy to use. The specifications are listed below:
Aperture – 40mm
Focal Length – 400m
Thermal stability 0.005 Å/C
F/Ration -F/10
Bandwidth - <1.0 Å
Safety blocking >10^-5 from EUV/IR

The filter in it is a Hydrogen ALpha one, designed to transmit a narrow bandwidth of light generally centred on a certain bandwidth with a red visible line at 6562.8 Å.

The camera we have is a NexImage Solar System Imager web cam which has a CCD sensor to provide excellent light sensitivity and colour fidelity. Its barrel size was 1.25”, the same as the eyepiece on the telescope. We found out it can also take live video, which is great for taking lots of images and then stacking them up.

The camera is attached to the laptop we are using by the USB. Its quite convenient and the software isn't too confusing. It's important to name each file before taking the image, under
FILE -- > SET CAPTURE FILE and then you can name it.

Day 1: aims

Today we got started with our Solar telescope project. We set down some aims to start with:
1. To learn more about the telescope and how it works.
2. Take a range of images at differing exposure times to discover when saturation occurs.
3. Determine where the best focus is by taking several images at differing focuses.
4. Take stacks of images to add them up using RegStack software to highlight faint features and details.
5. Look into prominences and sunspots.
6. Track the progress of current sunspots.
7. Investigate the speed of rotation of the Sun.
8. Use software to determine possible transits of the ISS and find possible flights in front of the Sun.