Today is a good day to get out the solar glasses if you own them and take a look at the Sun. Sunspot region 11654 is large enough to be seen without magnification. It goes without saying that you MUST have specially manufactured solar glasses or film to try this...do not look at the Sun otherwise.
Noting how large the spot complex was, I attempted to take a few pictures of the Sun in white light using my TEC 140 refractor, a Lunt Solar Systems Herschel Prism, and my Canon T2i. Despite passing clouds and a very unstable atmosphere, I ended up with three usable images- one of the whole Sun, one with a 2x Barlow lens to double the magnification, and one with the Barlow attached directly to the camera (without its normal extension) which results in something like a magnification factor of 1.6. To acquire the images, I used the software program
BackyardEOS. For reference at left, is today's image from the
Solar and Heliospheric Observatory labeled with the active spot region numbers.
Click the images below to enlarge them.
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| Full Disc |
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| Approx. 1.6x Barlow |
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| 2x Barlow |
Today is a good day to get out the solar glasses if you own them and take a look at the Sun. Sunspot region 11654 is large enough to be seen without magnification. It goes without saying that you MUST have specially manufactured solar glasses or film to try this...do not look at the Sun otherwise.
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