Sunspot 1302

Solar activity is up compared to last year but there still isn't a huge amount going on. This sudden sunny spell tempted me into the garden today to see what was on offer. Here's the Sun as of 10 o'clock this morning:


Much more interesting than the last time I took some sunspot pictures! So much so that I got out the webcam and took some videos of the main sunspot towards the centre (sunspot 1302). The detail has come out quite well:


The conditions were fairly still so I managed to get sharper focus than usual. It makes a change from the Moon!

I Got The Sun In The Morning...

...And all of the rest of the day since I now have an Orion Solar Filter. Simply fit it over the front of the telescope and it cuts out 99.999% of incoming light. This makes the Sun a safe observing target and shows up sunspots, prominences and granulation.

Sunspots are areas on the surface of the Sun where the magnetic field has become tangled up making one patch cooler than the surrounding area. The temperature of the sunspot will be around 4,000 degrees compared to around 6,000 degrees for the surrounding area. The cooler area shows up as dark spot on the surface. Sunspots can be very big - the biggest can be up to around 50,000 miles across.

It has been well publisized that the Sun has been rather quiet over the last few years. The Sun goes through a fairly regular cycle every 11 years or so where it changes from having very few sunspots to lots of sunspots and back again. The current low period has been going on for longer than usual but there are signs that activity is beginning to pick up again (last year 71% of days showed no sunspots compared to 16% so far this year).

This increase in activity left me optimistic that once the recent spell of rain had abated I would be spotting spots straight away. Alas no. The clouds cleared at the start of a mini-streak of 5 spot-free days. This morning was a different story. After consulting the latest space weather, I knew that I'd have at least one sunspot to look at, and here it is:



Sunspot 1101 is clearly visible in the bottom-right quadrant. There was quite a lot of whispy cloud around (as can be seen in the picture) so I settled for a few afocal snaps rather than getting out the webcam. It will be interesting to see what resolution can be achieved on a clearer day and what happens to sunspot 1101 in the future.

Partial Lunar Eclipse

A fitting way to round off my early adventures in afocal astrophotography is with the partial lunar eclipse of December 31st 2009.

The viewing conditions weren't particularly good but I did get to watch the eclipse from start to finish over about an hour and a half. As a result my photos aren't particularly sharp but I can't complain since many parts of the UK didn't get to see the eclipse at all. The pick of the bunch is this one, which is and close to maximum shadow and relatively sharp (although still hazy):


Not only did this eclipse mark the end of 2009 but it also marked the end of my main method of astrophotography - the arrival of my webcam was imminent...

More Afocal Astrophotography

My second attempt at afocal astrophotography was of a very striking half-moon towards the end of November 2009. The pick of the photos is this one:


I particular like the arc of mountains in the upper half of the picture, running from Plato at the top downwards to Eratosthenes. Inside this arc the largest crater is Archimedes.

A couple of points of interest: if you follow the mountains away from Eratosthenes until just before the first obvious gap this is roughly the landing site of Apollo 15, the fourth Moon landing. Secondly to get a feeling of the scale of features on the Moon, Eratosthenes is about 35miles or 58km across which is not far off the size of my home city of Birmingham.

First Light

As I mentioned in my earlier posts I got back into observing about 5 months ago which means I have quite a lot to catch up on, particularly from an astrophotography point of view.

My first observing session was on 1st November 2009 which happened to be a nearly full moon. I didn't have my webcam back then so had do make do with what was available. I'd seen some impressive results from people doing afocal astrophotography so I thought I'd have a go with my point-and-shoot Olympus digital camera.

For those who don't know, afocal astrophotography is simply holding a camera up to the eyepiece and taking a picture.

I started with a 32mm eyepiece so that I could get the whole of the moon in the field of view. I also used a moon filter to reduce the glare.

After a few minutes of messing around it was very easy to get some decent shots. The pick of the bunch was probably this one...



For something so easy it was hugely satisfying to produce such good results. I tried increasing the magnification but found it much more difficult to align the camera at the eyepiece. Also the photos of smaller sections of the moon were nowhere near as impressive as getting the full moon into the field of view.

So that was my first step into astrophotography. A very small and simple step but one that left me wanting more.