Saturday February 12, 2005
Seeing spots

Here's how the sun is looking today...



Sun w/spots Spots closeup

Two different views of today's Sun spots. Today is a little hazy but I caught a brief window of time without much covering the Sun. Both photos are with the D70 and our 120mm telescope. On the top image the D70 was mated straight to the telescope for a 1/80 second exposure through the solar filter.

The second photo is using an odd contraption which mounts the D70 and still allows the use of standard telescope lens. I tried both the 40mm and 19mm telescope lens and settled on the 19mm for the bottom image. At that magnification the available light is very small which makes it difficult to align the shot and focus. I bracketed both focus and exposure, focus being manually controlled with the telescope.

According to Space Weather none of these sunspots hold much in store in the way of strong solar flares. The spots are, from right to left (rightmost only seen on top photo): 730, 733, 734, and 735.


leigh • 2005-02-12 09:58pm

Awesome and creative. I'm impressed :-)