French astronomy photographer Jean-Paul Godard sent us this solar prominence animation last month. He took dozens of videos with his DMK 41AU02.AS camera, processed each video into one image in Registax, combined those images into a sequence to make this animation.

Solar Prominence

We quote his email as below:

This animation shows a very fast “ejection” as I never saw before. However, this “blob” does not appear to have escaped the sun. Indeed, it might not have been a blob at all, but rather a plasma wave traveling up a magnetic flux tube and ‘breaking’ when it reached the top. Whether it was a rocketing blob or breaking wave, it shows that even the quiet sun is worth watching.

I  try to make animations of solar protuberanes with a ED80 telescope (ED80+Coronado SM40 and BF15)  and a DMK 41AU02.AS camera. Each picture of the animation is issued from the tratment of a short movie (60 frames). The Treatment of each frame is basically made with “Registax” (automated by BUI-Registax). All the images are put together in a gif file.

(As IC Capture from TIS does not allow to make movies repeatidly, I use a small own developped utility to “click” every minute to launch IC Capture. It’s called Click-Auto). Click-auto and Bui-Registax may be downloaded from

http://astrosurf.com/dslr_automat/accueil_bui_registax.htm

Made on Sept 05 2009  Close to Paris (France) in an astronmy observatory called “l’Uranoscope”.

Thank you Jean-Paul! Brilliant work!