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J.J. Dobias, G. A. Chapman, A.M. Cookson, D.G. Preminger, S.R. Walton (SFO/CSUN)
We report here on a study of growth and decay rates of sunspot and facular areas of solar active regions. The data used in this project come from an ongoing program of daily photometric observations of the sun with the Cartesian Full Disk Telescope No. 1 (CFDT1) at the San Fernando Observatory (SFO). Sunspot regions are determined from images taken with a red filter centered at 672.3 nm with a bandpass of 9.7 nm, while images taken with a Ca II K line filter, centered at 393.4 nm and with a bandpass of only 1nm, are used to find facular areas. Before any areas can be found on any observed images, they have to be calibrated then flattened by removing limb darkening thus producing contrast images. Sunspot areas are then determined from any pixel with contrast of -8.5% or less, while any pixel on a K line contrast image with a contrast of +4.8%/\mu or higher, where \mu is the cosine of the heliocentric angle, is considered to be a facular pixel. To identify the areas as clearly as possible, studied active regions were usually observed on the sun with relatively low activity; that means that each region is either alone on the sun's disk or with only very few other active regions present. Furthermore, to obtain growth and decay patterns of the areas as reliably as possible, only such active regions must be chosen for which there is as complete observational coverage as possible. At the present time studies have been finished for only a few active regions, but analysis of several others is on going. Obtained results will be presented at the meeting. This work is supported by NSF grant ATM-9912132 and NASA grants NAG5-7191 and NAG5-7778.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 34
© 2002. The American Astronomical Soceity.