On Saturday SpaceWeather.com ran a story announcing that a dark magnetic filament more than 400,000 km long was snaking around the sun's southeastern limb. Prompted by this phenomenon I drove to the Highlands in order to image the sun using the Centre’s hydrogen-alpha telescope. Unfortunately thin clouds moved in front of the sun and stayed there most of the afternoon. In the end I managed to acquire a few usable images and processed the image you see above. I also had a chance to observe the sun through Sid’s 8-inch telescope. The view was surprisingly good and we observed numerous sunspots.

Date: 13:43 PST on December 4, 2010
Constellation: Sun in Ophiuchus
Location: Sid’s Scoop, the Highlands near Victoria, BC
Optics: Coronado SolarMax 40 Telescope on Takahashi EM-11 Mount using eyepiece projection (18mm Coronado eyepiece)
Camera: Canon EOS 7D
Exposure: One RAW light frames of 1/400 second and one RAW light frame of 1/320 second, ISO 400
Processing: Two images stacked using median in ImagesPlus. Aggressive sharpening applied in IP.