Full Disk Feast

H-Alpha Sun - August 2, 2011
H-Alpha Sun - August 2, 2011

This morning everything seemed to be right. The weather was absolutely great, the Sun was more active than I’ve seen so far this year and the seeing was above average. A good day to try sketching a full-disk h-alpha sun for the first time instead of an isolated prominence. First I made a blank disk with a soft white pastel. I took the sketch outside and filled in all the details I could see through the eyepiece of my 70mm solar telescope with white and black pastel pencils. All regions were very active, especially the middle one: it changed its shape within minutes. Sometimes little bright flare-like brightenings appeared and disappeared 2 minutes later. A wonderful sight! It took me one hour (from 08.00 UT – 09.00 UT) to complete the drawing. I scanned the (black&white) sketch and gave it a reddish color with Photoshop.
Object Name Sun
Object Type Star
Location Deventer, The Netherlands
Date August 2, 2011
Media Pastel on black paper

Kind regards,

Roel Weijenberg
www.roelblog.nl

5 thoughts on “Full Disk Feast”

  1. Roel,

    An outstanding observation of the Sun showing an impressive amount of detail. The effort put into this sketch was well with it. Thank you for sharing it with us all.

    Carlos

  2. Roel,

    Such a beautiful sketch. Really, really beautiful sketch of our star. Everytime I take another look at it I see new details, exciting me all over again.

    Top stuff.

    Alex M.

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