Searching for Motion within the Solar Atmosphere (Abstract)

Volume 43 number 2 (2015)

Susan N. Oatney

9516 West Morgan Avenue, Partridge, KS 67566; susanoatney@emypeople.net

Abstract

(Abstract only) The mystery of heat transfer within the solar atmosphere has long been a subject of study and debate. Not unlike large solar observatories that are funded by public monies, amateur solar observers also have a keen interest in this subject, and are able to creatively employ tools at hand such as a two-slit interferometer used to create interference lines in an attempt to measure motion (interference patterns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment). With a 6-inch equatorially pier-mounted refractor focused just above the visible disk of the sun, images were taken with a Meade Lunar Planetary Imager video LPI CMOS camera at ~30 Hz sample rates and stored as FITS files. A variety of photometry, unrated color, and full-aperture solar filters were combined with and without a two-slit interferometer placed at the focus of the telescope. These images, explored through the NASA FITS viewer (http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/software/ftools/fv/), were applied to show logarithmic color contours. Selected fv images were placed consecutively in a movie format that shows some cyclical motion around and between the contours, mostly of the solar corona.