New Planetary Camera

My first photo with my new camera

Finally got a chance to try out my new planetary camera attached to my refracting telescope.

The sky was blue and the sun was beating down on our backyard, so having made myself a white light filter for my telescope, I set about taking a film clip of images of the sun using my new camera.

Problem was, that after a period of intense solar activity, the sun's disc was almost devoid of spots.  I managed to find a small group very near to the sun's rim and had a go at photographing them.  Its quite difficult focussing on an object near the rim as the curvature of the sun's surface creates difficulties.

Sunspots are temporary phenomena on the photosphere of the Sun that appear visibly as dark spots compared to surrounding regions. They are caused by intense magnetic activity, which inhibits convection by an effect comparable to the eddy current brake, forming areas of reduced surface temperature. Like magnets, they also have two poles. Although they are at temperatures of roughly 3000–4500 K (2727–4227 °C), the contrast with the surrounding material at about 5780 K (5500 °C) leaves them clearly visible as dark spots, as the luminous intensity of a heated black body (closely approximated by the photosphere) is a function of temperature to the fourth power. If the sunspot were isolated from the surrounding photosphere it would be brighter than an electric arc. Sunspots expand and contract as they move across the surface of the Sun and can be as large as 80,000 kilometers (50,000 mi) in diameter, making the larger ones visible from Earth without the aid of a telescope.^[1] They may also travel at relative speeds ("proper motions") of a few hundred m/s when they first emerge onto the solar photosphere.

Manifesting intense magnetic activity, sunspots host secondary phenomena such as coronal loops (prominences) and reconnectionevents. Most solar flares and coronal mass ejections originate in magnetically active regions around visible sunspot groupings. (Wikipedia)

Sunspot in UV light (taken by the Trace spacecraft)