This is an image of
AR12850. Here you can see three sunspots with surrounding plage.
The animated version shows the slight rotation of the Sun over the course of an hour. It consists of 15 frames, each a 50% stack of subframes from 2min of video captured at 5fps. Considering the synodic rotation period of the Sun (the apparent rotation period based on the movement of surface features along the solar equator relative to the perspective of Earth) is 26.24 days, or about 13.72° of rotation per day, we’re looking at about half a degree of rotation here.
This session presented a lot of firsts for me. I had never done solar before, and was nervous as hell to even point the scope at the sun. So as a precaution, I opted to use my old Logitech webcam instead of one of my newer cameras, just in case I ended up cooking it.
Seeing the disk of the sun for the first time absolutely blew my mind. What made it even more amazing was seeing a sunspot for the first time, too! I hardly expected
this setup to work, let alone resolve any surface features, especially at this point in the solar cycle.
The scope used was an old Meade Model 290-P 60mm f/15 refractor that's seen a few modifications, and a lot of love. I swapped the stock 0.965" focuser for a standard 1.25" focuser, and hand crafted a
set of tube rings for it myself. The Baader ASSF-50 perfectly fits the diameter of the scope. I'm also using a UV/IR cut filter with the Logitech webcam since it's
modified to be a full spectrum camera.
With this being my first time, couldn't be happier with the results.
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