I just had a look. The big one appears to have dissipated but there is a very nice tree-shaped one. This Sun viewing can become addictive. :) patrick On 14 Apr 2010, at 14:00, Chuck Hards wrote:

Thanks, Kurt, I plan on taking out the PST when I get home this afternoon. Hopefully there's still some nice activity going-on.

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 1:46 PM, Canopus56 <canopus56@yahoo.com> wrote:

...

When I checked the Sun out at 10:30am MDT 4-14 Wed, there was a nice large prom on the northwest limb (setting) - class B fan-shape with a 1 or 2 arcmin height. - Kurt

I managed to take a peek for about 40 minutes yesterday afternoon. There was quite a bit of activity, all around the limb. I did see the "tree" formation, very nice, guys. The seeing wasn't good, however, it rarely is late in the afternoon. But there are a few tricks we can employ with the PST: Use the LOWEST power possible that shows you the detail you are interested in seeing. By concentrating the image in a smaller area, contrast is increased. Higher powers make some prominences so dim that they become very hard to see. This has a secondary advantage. If you minimize the size of the solar disk in the eyepiece, you can get the entire sun in the "sweet spot" at the center of the field. Notice that with the PST, when the solar image is large, you have to tweak the tuning and can't get both the center of the field and the edge at optimal bandpass at the same time. Keep the image small and centered, and the entire solar disk is crisp, well-defined, and visible at the same bandpass. I was getting great views with 20mm, 25mm, and even a 32mm eyepiece. The image was much smaller of course, but the prominences were much brighter, more easily seen, and the entire solar disk was in crisp, sharp focus as well as showing H-a detail everywhere. No tweaking needed when going from center to edge. Especially at low solar angles such as morning and late afternoon, a gobi is desireable. With my Orion goto mount, I simply hold the hand paddle up in front of my brow while observing, and it works very well. For alignment of the mount, I used the 2-star method, choosing Hamal, which is currently just east of the sun's position, and an estimated location for Polaris (good to within about 5 degrees). Tracking was dead-on at the low powers I was using. If this high cloud dissipates this afternoon, I will try again and maybe see if I can get some video.