Investigation of the behavior of umbral bright dots according to solar spot morphology

The dynamic structure of the Sun and processes which cause the change in the solar activity has not fully understood. Even though, there are many ongoing research on this topics. The significant developments in astronomical observation and methods create great opportunities to better understand the physical properties of the Sun. With the introduction of advanced technology and observation tools led the opportunity to study the atmosphere and the surface of the Sun in more details. The new structures with very small scales and different dynamics in different layers of the Sun are being discovered with these new technologies. High resolution images obtained from telescopes having a high-resolution instruments onboard was crucial in this for observing these structures. In this thesis, bright umbral dots (Umbral Dots, UDs) were studied in detail using the solar images taken with Goode Solar Telescope (GST) in Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO). This telescope takes the highest resolution solar images in the World right now. Basic properties and some physical parameters such as brightness, eccentricity, radius, lifetimes, sunspot areas and velocities of these structures were calculated and the relationships between these features were studied. In this study, three active regions and five sunspots with National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) active region (AR) numbers 12177, 12384 and 12541 were used. AR 12177 and AR 12384 have 1 sunspot, while AR 12541 has 3 sunspots. First, co-align analysis was applied to the sunspot images and they were made ready for image processing. Then, the umbral area of the sunspot to be studied was removed from the image by using a mask to determine the umbra-penumbra boundary. After obtaining the umbral UDs are located after obtaining the umbral area. Pixels on the image that can be considered as noise in the image are removed with filters. UDs appear as white dots on a black background. Image normalization was performed to make these features even more distinctive before starting to detect and follow these features. Finally, image enhancement steps have been applied to the images by changing the required parameters and modifying the rest of the code written in IDL (Interactive Data Language) which is already available in the literature. The UDs in the umbra of each sunspot were detected and followed and the physical parameters of these UDs were found and analyzed. It was found that the sunspot with UD varies according to the morphology.