Running Penumbral Waves and the Horse Head

Here is a time lapse movie of solar active region 1147 captured at 1 minute intervals on 18 January 2011 from 1841-2110 UT.  Quite a bit of flow can be seen in the sunspot penumbra (click on the image to start, this will take a minute or two to download).

 Take a close look at the sunspot. Do you notice small waves radiating from its center?  These are called running penumbral waves. They are moving at approximately 20 kilometers per second. Clear skies also permitted some deep sky imaging. This is an image of IC434, the horse head nebula, and the flame nebula NGC2024. I used a Meade 80EDT and an Atik 314L CCD. I used 10 5-minute images of Ha (red), and 10 5-minute images of OIII (green). An average of the 2 images was used for a blue color channel. Deep space narrow band imaging works well in the urban skies near San Diego.

I also set up my Celestron C11 and tried some hi res lunar imaging. Not the greatest optics, but it seems to work fairly well on the moon and planets. Here is an image of the crater Shiller, one of my favorites.