Our Sun

I took a break from packing for our train trip to do some solar observing and imagery.  It is sunny and relatively warm today (in the 30s) so I wanted to get outside for a little bit.  This also gave me a chance to test my homemade solar finderscope while mounted on my telescope.  The finderscope worked fine which made easy work of finding the sun. 

There is still so much snow out there that the sun was blinding in the bright sunlight!  I couldn't see a thing on my camera when I mounted it on the telescope.  It was difficult getting my settings correct and then it was difficult seeing well enough to focus.  I managed to capture a pretty good image of the sun though. 

Although I captured a sunspot on our sun today, we're actually in a lull lately for solar activity.  We won't hit peak in solar activity again until 2024 if I remember correctly.  Last summer was exceptionally dull with absolutely no details seen on the surface of the sun when viewing in white light.  Now, we have this tiny sunspot which, actually, is almost the size of Earth!  The sun is massive compared to our tiny planet. 

Anyway, here is an image of our sun in white light as seen this afternoon...


Now I could use some lunch before finishing up my packing for our trip.

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