Daniel Borcard is two for two. He won the Photo of the Week prize on April 29, 2022 — for the second week in a row — with his image of a pair of sunspot regions.

Imaging from his front yard in Saint-Roch-de-l’Achigan, Québec, on April 22, 2022, Borcard said that between clouds, he had an opportunity to observe and image the groups of active regions AR 2993 and 2994.

“AR 2993 is the triplet of close spots on the right, and AR 2093 is the rest (centre and left spots),” he wrote.”This allowed for an absolutely gorgeous sight, even if the seeing was quite irregular. North is to the top left of the image.”

Imaged with a Sky-Watcher Maksutov 150 mm/1800 mm telescope riding on an iOptron iEQ30 mount, Borcard said the telescope was equipped with a Baader Astro-Solar Density 5 filter. The camera was a QHY5-III-290M with a green filter.

“This is a stack of 4,000 of 10,000 images stacked with AutoStakkert!3 and processed with AstroSurface and Photoshop CS3,” he wrote.

Honourable mention

Ron Brecher received our honourable mention for his image of IC 417, the “Spider and Fly” region in Auriga.

Located in the constellation Auriga, IC 417 is an emission nebula about 10,000 light-years away from Earth. Brecher wrote on his website that the spider (IC 417, centre) is in its web waiting to catch the fly (NGC 1931, upper right).

Brecher captured the image from his SkyShed in Guelph, Ontario, using a Sky-Watcher Esprit 150 refractor (f/7) and QHY600M camera with Optolong Hydrogen-alpha, Oxygen III and Sulphur II 3nm filters. He wrote that he collected 12 hours and 40 minutes of narrowband data.