Several times this December, I have taken a look at the sun with my 10 inch scope and a Baader filter. The filter works fairly well in seeing sunspots and other white light features of the sun.
Yesterday, I tried taking a few photos with my phone camera through the eyepiece. Most of the images were not very good. A few were worth looking at. The image attached to this post was taken through a 10mm Radian eyepiece at a magnification of about 120X. The cropped area is about 1/20 of the original photo. It clearly shows the two pairs of spots which I saw visually.
I have read that sunspots always appear in pairs, that the spots are the two points where a local magnetic field line crosses the visible surface of the sun. In this photo, there are two nearly equal pairs. There is an inner pair of small spots and an outer pair of larger spots. Also, spots appear in pairs that are parallel to the sun's rotation, which is approximately parallel with our rotation around the sun. These pairs did move leftward in my reflector, so the west is to the left and the east is to the right. South is up and north is down in these views.
nice job.. getting into astrophotography huh?? Have you used the webcam yet?
ReplyDeleteI tried to take an image of Jupiter with my tracking SCT. It was not very impressive. I am impressed how some things (sunspots and moon features can easily be recorded with a simple camera at the eyepiece.
ReplyDeleteRick