At last, I’ve seen the Northern Lights. A short break in Tromsø and despite a slightly iffy weather forecast the first night we took a tour out off the city. Weather was forecast to be best over Kvaløya so that was the direction we headed and the clouds started to thin after we’d travelled a few miles. This was probably the brightest but I’ve still got some more pictures to process.
The current active phase of the Sun continues apace with another large sunspot group crossing the face of the sun over the last few days. I took this picture yesterday just before sunset which shows AR1520, the large grouping at the top of the picture with 1519 & 1521 the two at the very bottom.
Edit:At 16:53 UT on the 12th Jul sunspot AR1520 unleashed an X class solar flare in the direction of Earth. http://www.spaceweather.com has further details.
A break occurred in the clouds just before sunset on friday so I took the opportunity to image the large sunspot group currently crossing the face of the sun. My front porch has a reasonable gap between the trees so I setup the Zenithstar on the Astrotrac and attached the Canon 350D.
I stacked about 40 images from the Canon. Individual exposures were 0.003 seconds at ISO 100. The focal length is 420mm.
