Today, the sky was clear enough for me to actually do some solar astronomy. The atmospherics were lousy, with shimmering all over the place, and some high, very thin clouds.
I took the Meade out onto the porch this morning, and got the guiding nearly perfect.
There are 2 active sunspot regions visible on the Sun today, 1057, and 1059. Both are Cycle 24 spots, with 1059 just coming over the limb
I managed 2 decent images of 1057, and they are in the photogallery on our website.
I was out so long towards the end of my observing/imaging session, I started to get some odd artefacts in the telescope and on the image. I mean *really weird* then I looked up, and it was the edge of the porch roof coming into the eyepiece.
Since the porch is about a gazillion times closer to the telescope than the sun, it was a little out of focus.
