Sol, 21st April

[Jay-qu]

Like many others here, I recently purchased a solar filter to capture the transit and eclipse this year. Today was my first go at Solar imaging, and the first time I have seen sunspots (last time I used a solar scope was during the previous solar minimum).

Setup was nice and easy in the bright daylight, though I need to practice daytime polar alignment a bit more - I ended up doing a lot of manual adjustment. I was very pleased to see so much detail in the spots (in ep), but struggled to capture it with the DSLR. I'm not sure how good the seeing was given I have nothing to compare it to, maybe someone else can guess.. :shrug:

I tried to take some AVI's but am still learning the ropes of registax, so for now here are some single frame shots.

Captured with Thousand Oaks type 2+ filter, Canon 500D and Skywatcher 100ED on CG5, both were ISO200, ~1/100s and processed in Lightroom. The final is a 100% crop of the central sunspot region, with my best effort at bringing out detail.

Thanks for looking :)

[cybereye]

Nice work!

The last time I'd seen any sunspots was when, as a kid, I projected an image of the sun on to a piece of paper I held behind my old telescope. It did the trick but had nothing on the view I saw this morning!

Cheers,
Mario

[astronobob]

Good ones Jay-qu, Nice action on sol atm, looking forward to your transit captures ?

[Matt Wastell]

Thanks for the views!