Sunspots 987 and 988 - 30th March

Well, sky is clear and so got a chance to play with the scope and filters again today. This time, I left out the solar continuum filter and used the herschel wedge, 2x barlow, 9mm eyepiece and took the image afocal.



What I found most interesting was the little spots that appeared around 988 (the larger one).

The reason why I didn't use the continuum is that the filter is completely in the green end of the spectrum so there would be little useful information hitting the scolour chip in the red and blue. Therefore, the resolution of the image would be affected if only a percentage of the pixels are actually reading useful data. The barlow helped alot also.
For visual observing, I can confirm that the solar continuum filter shows alot more of the granualtion than without using it. However, it needs high magnification to make the most of it.

Great minds Michael

See what you mean about the little spots!

Thanks Paul. Nice full disc images by yourself too.

Just to clarify something I said in the previous post, the continuum filter doesn't just bring out more detail in the granulation but also makes it easier to see the magnetic field lines in the penumbra regions of the sunspots.

Here's one of just AR978.
This time I used a 2x barlow and a 1.6x barlow.
You can see the effect I mentioned in the previous post about all the little sunspots arounf AR978.

How are sunspots named/numbered if they appear at random?

Surely no one sunspot appears in the same place at the same time every time.

I'm hoping for clear days this week to get out and look for some.

dont rule out imaging with the cont. filter. remember that the bayer matrix on your ccd chip on the 400d has a G for every other channel eg G R G B G so it should contain useful info. maybe split the channels and work on them individually. fantastic grain detail btw.

Dave