Solar Observing

Sunday was a beautiful day! The sun was shining, the snow was melting, and at least for most of the day there wasn't a cloud in the sky. This afforded me the opportunity to get out the 4.5-inch Orion reflecting telescope to look at the Sun. Of course, I had a special solar filter that fit over the open aperture of the telescope, which made looking at the Sun safe for my eyes. (Note: Never look at the Sun through a telescope without a special filter!)

The Sun's activity has been on the rise recently, meaning the occurrence of northern lights will likely be increasing over the next couple years. We just had a nice show last week - which Oneonta missed due to rain that night - but hopefully there will be more to come. An increase in solar activity is typically tied to an increase in the number of sunspots, and it was sunspots that I was hoping to observe.

While there were no giant sunspots, there was one set of spots that was nicely visible through the eyepiece at 17X magnification, along with a few tiny ones peppered across the Sun's face. Here is an image I took by holding up my digital camera to the eyepiece:

In the upper-left "quadrant" you can see a small dark sunspot. The image is rotated such that the "top" of the Sun is actually to the bottom-left (a result of the Newtonian design of the telescope). Unfortunately I wasn't able to get a sharper picture of the sunspot with the camera, but the view through the eyepiece was great!

After sunset I noticed that the sky was clear so I put on warm clothes and drove up to the observatory at College Camp. However, by the time I got there (~9:30 p.m.) it had mostly clouded over so I went home disappointed. Jupiter rises at sunset these days, so you can see it shining brightly in the east after the Sun goes down. Through even a modest-sized telescope the 4 Galilean moons are easily visible, and I had hoped to observe the motion of those moons over the course of the evening. No luck this time, but the weather forecast is looking promising for tomorrow or Wednesday.