Live solar observing at Chabot Space & Science CenterWhile NASA may have just started showing us the Sun "as never before seen" through their Solar Dynamics Observatory (yes, with each new launch of a solar satellite, we again see the Sun as never before seen—which is actually very cool), at Chabot our observatory volunteers have started doing the same thing--in your own backyard!

Our weekend daytime observatory volunteer team has assembled their own live solar observatory, using a SolarMax 70 hydrogen-alpha filter telescope, a video camera, a wireless transmitter, and a large flat-panel display screen—and now that the weather is beginning to cooperate, their offering to our visitors will take place on a more regular basis.

I was up there last Sunday to see the system at work, and was very impressed. With the telescope and wireless transmitter set up outside on the observatory deck, the image of the Sun captured by the video camera was transmitted into the dome of our large telescope, Rachel, where a receiver caught the signal and piped it into the large display monitor attached to the central pier.

Even though there were no sunspots that day—and sunspots are what people generally expect to see, if anything—the Sun put on quite a show in the "hydrogen alpha" wavelength of light (a select red color emitted by hot hydrogen in the Sun's atmosphere). While the Sun's visible surface is populated by features like granules (convection cells), sunspots, and faculae, the h-alpha scope revealed a layer of the Sun's atmosphere, the chromosphere ("sphere of color", named for the bright red light emitted by the hydrogen gas).

We observed several filaments and two or three prominences on this day, even though the Sun was relatively quiet and showing little surface sunspot activity.

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Filaments and prominences are the same thing, really: "clouds" of hydrogen gas in the Sun's chromosphere, shaped and contained by the force of solar magnetic fields. When seen at the edge of the Sun's disk, these clouds appear as bright flame-like structures against the dark background of space, and we call them prominences. When seen within the Sun's disk, they appear as dark streaks and strands, the cooler gases in the clouds silhouetted against the brighter surface of the Sun; in this case we call them filaments.

Each of the little puffs of prominence we saw—like bonfires surging up from the edge of the Sun—were actually enormous structures, several times the size of the Earth. And we saw them change as well; in only minutes, the structures would shift and form new shapes, reminding us that the Sun is a very active and dynamic object, always on the go.

Solar activity is now on the rise, after a multi-year lull of quiet as we passed through the bottom of the 11-year solar cycle. We are seeing sunspots on more occasions, which are revealing areas of rising magnetic activity. The activity should only increase going forward, and is expected to reach a crescendo ("solar maximum") sometime around 2012 or 2013. Then, as was the case a decade ago when Chabot Space & Science Center opened, we can expect to see a dozen or so sunspots at any given time, and many more filaments and prominences.

I hope you can make it up to Chabot on a sunny weekend afternoon and see what our volunteers are up to. Forget about that sunny beach; come up to Chabot to learn about the object that makes that beach sunny!

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The Sun---Live In Your Own Backyard!