26 July 2004

Observing Location	Parkchester South Condominium Oval, The Bronx, NY
Atmospheric Conditions	After several days of lousy weather we got a nice day before it begins raining again tomorrow. It is a little warm and humid. Cloud cover is probably 10-25% and a mix of types. That makes sense since they say a front is on the way. But where you can see the sky it is a clear blue.
Instruments	Canon 15x50 Image Stabilized binoculars Baader AstroSolar filter film
Observing Party	Charlie Ridgway

Target	Sun
Time	26Jul04; 1522 EDT
Category	Sun
Comments	Without binoculars sunspot 652 was barely visible today in the lower right quadrant of the sun at about 4:30. The umbras were widely separated and still confined within a continuous penumbra. There were two smaller spots above the main body and disconnected trailing off toward 12:30. Below were a pair of small spots around 5:30 well back from the limb. Another pair of small spots was in the upper left quadrant at about 10:30 and well onto the face of the disk. 652 is still large but is getting over close enough to the limb of the sun that foreshortening is going to start making it appear smaller than it really is. It appears to be dissipating and may not survive its passage over the back side of the sun to come back to the visible disk again. These images have been cropped from the original and then shrunk down to fit on the page without making you scroll all over to see them or waiting forever while they download. So I have no idea how their size relates to that of the originals.

Target	Clouds
Time	26Jul04; 1540 EDT
Category	Clouds
Comments	I don't know for sure what this is but it looks like a reverse contrail. Normally contrails appear as thin straight lines of cloud after a jet has passed by and water has condensed onto the jet exhaust. It looks here like a jet has flown through a layer of cloud and caused the condensed moisture in that local area to evaporate. This is purely speculation on my part at this point.