Lukey's Astrophotography

This morning, the sun was shining brightly and the sky was cloudless with good visibility so I asked Lukey if he wanted to look at the sun for a little while.  After we set up the telescope and all the associated gear for solar astronomy, we found the sun in the telescope.  We talked a little bit about sunspots, what they are and why there are none visible today.  I explained that we're in the middle of the 11 year solar cycle which is the long period of relatively little activity on the sun.  

Since there wasn't much to look at and discuss, we then we swapped out the eyepiece for one of my cameras so Lukey could shoot a few photos... Lukey picked up the remote shutter release and shot his first astrophotography images...

He shot just two photos but they came out very nicely!  They were both the same so I'm only sharing one of them here.  

The seeing was good this particular morning so we were able to capture some faint hints of the convection cells bubbling to the surface of the sun.  These convection cells give this full disk image a bit of a slight texture.  Hot plasma bubbles to the surface of the sun and then sinks back into the sun around the edges of the bubble as cooler plasma providing us with a granular appearance to the surface of the photosphere.  Had we used a different camera and magnified our view significantly (using much more complicated imaging technique) we probably could have captured some very well-defined convection cells but this full disk image is very nice!

The sun is just a featureless orb right now but it was nice to see the sun again.  We even used a more powerful eyepiece to get a closer look at the surface of the sun but, without any sunspots to see, it is difficult to focus on the slowly bubbling convection cells.  We opted to shoot a couple of photos of the full disk instead.  

Great job Lukey!