It's a monster. Sunspot 652 generated a large solar flare today and while not headed directly towards us, we'll catch some of the edge effect. Increased chance of auroras July 21st and 22nd. Ted says he used binoculars to project the sun onto a white piece of paper and was able to see the sun spot.

The photo is a little fuzzier than previous ones. There wasn't as much contrast this time. My process is something like: setup telescope, put camera on tripod, project Sun onto foam backed board, take a bunch of photos (with timer, holding breath), bring into photoshop, convert to B&W, run auto contrast, try to fix skew distortions (camera/board/image aren't always lined up), change image size to approximately 650 pixels wide, use magic wand to select background and delete, sharpen, change image size to final (usually 400px) width, save as jpg.

My setup is documented here: Photographing the Sun.

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