Editing Solar flare (section)

=== Optical observations ===
[[File:Carrington Richard drawing of 1859 sunspots.jpeg|thumb|Richard Carrington's sketch of the first recorded solar flare (A and B mark the initial bright points which moved over the course of five minutes to C and D before disappearing.)<ref name="Carrington1859">{{cite journal |last1=Carrington |first1=R. C. |date=November 1859 |title=Description of a Singular Appearance seen in the Sun on September 1, 1859 |url=https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/20/1/13/983482 |journal=Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society |volume=20 |pages=13–15 |bibcode=1859MNRAS..20...13C |doi=10.1093/mnras/20.1.13 |bibcode-access=free |doi-access=free}}</ref>]]
Solar flares were first observed by [[Richard Christopher Carrington|Richard Carrington]] and [[Richard Hodgson (publisher)|Richard Hodgson]] independently on [[Solar storm of 1859|1 September 1859]] by projecting the image of the solar disk produced by an optical telescope through a broad-band filter.<ref name=":0">{{cite journal |last=Carrington |first=Richard C. |date=November 1859 |title=Description of a singular appearance seen in the Sun on September&nbsp;1, 1859 |url=https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101081655332&view=1up&seq=357 |journal=Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society |volume=20 |issue=1 |pages=13–15 |bibcode=1859MNRAS..20...13C |doi=10.1093/mnras/20.1.13 |doi-access=free}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Hodgson |first1=Richard |date=November 1859 |title=On a curious Appearance seen in the Sun |url=https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101081655332&view=1up&seq=359 |journal=Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society |volume=20 |issue=1 |pages=15–16|doi=10.1093/mnras/20.1.15a |doi-access=free }}</ref> It was an extraordinarily intense ''white light flare'', a flare emitting a high amount of light in the [[visual spectrum]].<ref name=":0" />

Since flares produce copious amounts of radiation at [[H-alpha]],<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Druett |first1=Malcolm |last2=Scullion |first2=Eamon |last3=Zharkova |first3=Valentina |last4=Matthews |first4=Sarah |last5=Zharkov |first5=Sergei |last6=Rouppe Van der Voort |first6=Luc |date=27 June 2017 |title=Beam electrons as a source of Hα flare ribbons |journal=Nature Communications |language=en |volume=8 |issue=1 |page=15905 |bibcode=2017NatCo...815905D |doi=10.1038/ncomms15905 |issn=2041-1723 |pmc=5490266 |pmid=28653670}}</ref> adding a narrow (≈1 Å) passband filter centered at this wavelength to the optical telescope allows the observation of not very bright flares with small telescopes. For years Hα was the main, if not the only, source of information about solar flares. Other passband filters are also used.{{Citation needed|date=June 2024}}